The widespread use of social media by all demographics across the world allows us to better comprehend personal, corporate, and political concerns related to people’s views on sustainability. Basing itself on the communication study conducted via the Twitter use analysis, the article tries to identify the key communication themes tagged by the sustainability-related hashtags. The researchers have utilized the findings from over 400,000 Twitter conversations held by over 220,000 users from all around the world to look into people’s perceptions about sustainability. The information was gathered between April 17th and July 12th, 2019. In the subject of sustainability, important hashtags include innovation, environment, climate change, renewable energy, corporate social responsibility, and innovation.
In addition, the research identified six communities having a direct stake in long-term commercial performance because of the research. Genera Sustainability, Sustainability Awareness, Climate Change Damage Reduction, Renewable Energy Sources Innovative Technology, Green Construction Indicatives, and Food Waste Reduction are some of these areas of interest. The frameworks of these interest groups may be used in marketing communications or the firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. The analysis’ findings provide the firms concerned with a feasible route for improving their long-term business models with The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, released in 2015, established 17 interrelated Sustainable Development Goals, further divided into 169 objectives to guide global development policies and activities.
The Sustainable Development Goals addressed long-term requirements, such as education, global healthcare, poverty reproduction, and an ecologically balanced environment. Additionally, they addressed ‘softer’ goals such as inclusion and cultural sensitivity to minorities and marginalized communities around the world. Although just a few objectives mention ICT, the Agenda emphasizes the importance of global interconnectivity and knowledge societies, stating that given the fast growth of ICT, especially social media, SDGs must be dynamic and flexible.
Monitoring and detecting the ongoing technological developments are critical for the political framework, research and development, strategic planning, social investment, and business activities, including technology portfolio decision-making and investment incentives. Social media is used by about 2.82 billion individuals globally, and studying the data produced from social media provides insights into global communication. Individual social networks are comprised of a wide variety of overlapping groups, some of which actively communicate and partner on topics they consider important. They may participate in traditional social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, as well as discussion forums, or they may create their own.
Such social media actions include expressing one’s ideas, recounting experiences, alerting others of study findings, and actively broadcasting achieved or planned activities. The major reason for paying attention to an examination of the transmitted information is because of this. Understanding essential parts of a debate, identifying the primary issue, possibly engaging the groups of interest, and encouraging a fellow user to communicate and become a member of a conversation are all possible using content analysis. Data including messages cannot be obtained only through a transmission. Communication analysis allows the companies to glimpse into the evolving public perception of the subject and adjust operations accordingly.
Such social media actions include expressing one’s ideas, recounting experiences, alerting others of study findings, and actively broadcasting achieved or planned activities. The major reason for paying attention to an examination of the transmitted information is because of this. Understanding essential parts of a debate, identifying the primary issue, possibly engaging interest groups, and encouraging a communication partner to become a member of a conversation are all possible using content analysis. Data including messages cannot be obtained only through a transmission. Social media and social network communication analysis tools must be used to evaluate the role this pattern plays in global communication.
Until now, the analysis of visual media involved has been a minor aspect of social network research, but it is rising in relevance as a result of the fast growth of Instagram-specific communication, which primarily occurs through photos. The purpose of picture analysis is to offer additional information about the report’s context, such as the surroundings (namely, a farmers’ market or a train station) or fashion trends. The text analysis is next focused on finding keywords, which is accomplished using social networking approaches such as frequency distributions, eigenvectors, and betweenness centrality. Another aspect of text analysis is sentiment analysis, which is concerned with determining the users’ emotions.
To detect and include tweets (messages) from Twitter public activity, the Netlytic Software was utilized. The information was gathered between April 17th and July 12th, 2019. Messages using the hashtag #sustainable were collected by the program. During this time, a total of 414,926 Twitter messages were logged from 223,476 distinct individuals throughout the world. The data processing is enabled by the use of Knowledge Discovery in Databases approach, adapted to better fit the needs of social media data analysis, with an emphasis on a set of hashtags (Pilař et al., 2019). The process included four subsequent steps: content filtration, content transformation, hashtag reduction, and data mining.
The hashtag most often used under the same posts and activities as the hashtag #sustainable was #innovation, according to a simple frequency analysis conducted through a bivariate distribution tool. The term Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI) is used in the field of sustainability to describe a crucial strategic strategy that businesses commit to, ensuring their operations are aligned with principles of ecological harm reduction and proactive action. The hashtag #innovation was generally found in conjunction with the hashtag #tech, which refers to technology; 12,448 of the 32,264 posts containing the hashtag #innovation also contained the hashtag #tech (Pilař, 2019). As mentioned above, the posts were collected globally to ensure as widely covering sample of users as possible.
This study contributes to the understanding and discussion of sustainability in both a methodological and conceptual sense. The summarized research has provided new approaches for identifying current major areas of communication in the field of sustainability using a hashtag analysis on social media. Furthermore, it gives basic knowledge regarding sustainability communication on the Twitter social network. This study provides a method for tracking and detecting current technology developments, which might be important for governmental political development, strategic planning among businesses, marketing initiatives, and commercial practices. An example could be building support for a new business structure for food producers that engage in alternative production methods.
The paper has identified the six major themes from the area of sustainability that were discussed on Twitter: (1) sustainability of the environment, (2) general awareness, (3) renewable energy sources and climate change action, (4) technological innovations, (5) green construction works, and (6) food waste reduction, based on the community assessments. The overall results of the Twitter sustainability communication analysis indicated the renewable-energy-focused materials to be the most popular and widely discussed. Important conclusions from the community study include a lack of polarity across communities. Even the overlapping portions of the sustainability social media communication have a high degree of interconnectedness, indicating the nuanced nature of online discussion.
Reference
Pilař, L., Kvasničková Stanislavská, L., Pitrová, J., Krejčí, I., Tichá, I., & Chalupová, M. (2019). Twitter Analysis of Global Communication in the Field of Sustainability. Sustainability, 11(24), 6958. Web.