Social media as a new way to communicate corporate social responsibility in ports: the case of twitter at the port of Rotterdam

Stakeholder relationship management (SRM) has assumed a key function in shaping port competitiveness. To this scope, European Port Managing Bodies (PMBs) have developed new practices to engage salient stakeholders and meet their specific requirements, including growing attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Due to the increasing pressure of public opinion on environmental and social issues, the ability of European PMBs to communicate their CSR commitment and initiatives represents a key driver when searching for consensus of stakeholders and “license to operate”. In this perspective, the advent of web 2.0 and social media have provided PMBs with unprecedented opportunities to redesign and strengthen CSR communication strategies. The research objective of the paper is twofold. First, it scrutinises the current state of the art concerning the adoption of the most popular social media by European PMBs through online field research on the top-25 European ports. Second, the paper investigates the use of social media in the CSR communication strategies of European PMBs. In this regard, it provides an in-depth case study analysis of the use of Twitter by the Port of Rotterdam. The paper performs a content analysis of the tweets published by the @PortOfRotterdam in the 2017-2019 timeframe, by applying an original framework to detect and code CSR-related contents. Although empirical findings report the top-25 European ports extensively use social media, uneven approaches emerge considering port sizes and cultural clusters. Finally, the content analysis provides interesting managerial insights and future research avenues on the use of social media to communicate CSR in ports