How Posting About Diversity Affects Social Media Engagement

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[00:01:34] Diversity and inclusion have become buzzwords in many industries, especially as consumers increasingly demand greater representation and fairness from brands. But the practice has also become a political landmine. How do companies' decisions to post about D&I actually influence their social media engagement? Can posting boost brand loyalty and improve consumer perceptions? Or does it risk coming across as performative?

[00:02:01] That's the question tackled by Nick Bombay and his co-author in a paper called Does Posting About Diversity and Inclusion Improve Engagement in Social Media? Their research spans five years. It analyzes more than three million posts from nearly 300 brands, making it certainly one of the most comprehensive studies on the topic. He is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Amsterdam, and he joins me from there. Dr. Bombay, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here.

[00:02:28] Why do you think some brands are hesitant to post about diversity and inclusion, while others do it a lot? I mean, yeah, you see a lot of backlash, certainly. So, yeah, that's why brands are, of course, hesitant, right? So there's a lot of risk involved. You don't know whether you have to do it or not. The research on this topic is also a bit limited, usually for one brand maybe or for a couple of brands.

[00:02:53] So there's not a lot of evidence that gives them a lot of certainty to avoid that risk. So I guess that's why they do not want to do it. Of course, as you mentioned, there's also a lot of consumers that do appreciate it, right? And brands also pick up on those trends, so that might encourage them to do so. So it's a bit of a mixed bag, and that's why this might also be interesting to look at. I want to get to your results in just a second, but I just want to kind of get a definition.

[00:03:22] You mentioned fit as a key factor in your study. Can you explain what you mean by that? How messages are formed to begin with, the length, the sentiment of the message, whether that kind of fits with the general sentiment of DMY posting, right? So whether your general social media behavior is kind of consistent with that of DMY posting, that's kind of what we're looking at, whether that fit us there. Okay, well, let's get to the results. What did you learn?

[00:03:48] What did you learn about how posting about diversity on a brand's social channels affected the engagement? Yeah, so we looked at two main questions. The first one being who posts more about DMY, right? So which brands typically post more? So we see there that brands generally post more positive and have longer, well, this is on Twitter on X, so longer posts there tend to post more about DMY.

[00:04:16] And if they do so, in general, we find a positive effect, so that might already be important to mention. But we see that this positive effect also differs on the context. In general, it's not good to post together with emojis. And it is good to be positive in those messages. So those are like two major findings. And when you say not good, you mean that engagement dropped when people used emojis with diversity messages?

[00:04:45] It's kind of neutral. But for regular posts, it is positive. So if you, let's say, do not post about DMY, usually it's good to use emojis. And relative to that, when you do post about DMY, it's actually a neutral impact. So relative to regular posts, it's actually worse, basically. Do you have a gut sense as to why that is? So what we argue in the paper is that DMY is a more serious topic and emojis don't really fit with that.

[00:05:15] And of course, it might depend on the situation. I'm sure there are situations where it might fit an emoji, right? Depending on the context. But I think in general, most of these DMY posts are a little bit more serious than other posts. And then emojis would not really fit well with that. What kind of engagement are we talking here? Are we talking likes, comments, shares, or something deeper? Both likes and shares.

[00:05:40] We wanted to refrain from using comments because more comments is not always better. Because if the comments are negative, yeah, that might be a bad thing. So we were just looking at quantity here. So the number of likes and the number of shares. Both have very similar results, by the way. You mentioned some are, you get better results, some it's neutral. Are there any cases that you found where D&I posts led to lower engagement or negative reactions?

[00:06:11] Like we estimate eventually like averages across these brands and we don't find that. But we don't look at individual brands, right? So we're still looking at the total. We didn't analyze each of these almost 300 brands individually and then check for everyone how many are positive and how many are negative. But the average is positive. And also depending on these factors, it's all still positive.

[00:06:38] Even if you use emojis, it's still positive, but it's less positive, right? So all these factors might influence either positively or negatively the effect, but in general we do not find. That doesn't mean, of course, there might be tweets with low engagement that are about D&I. But over all these millions of tweets and all these brands, we see a clear positive effect. And I think it's important to mention that we look at differences within a brand.

[00:07:07] So we're not looking at, for example, Coca-Cola who does a lot of D&I and then another brand that doesn't do a lot of D&I posts. But we're looking at within Coca-Cola, they do sometimes D&I posts, sometimes a general post about something else. And we're looking at the difference between the two. Did you study how hashtags on those posts affected engagement? Yeah, hashtags were included in both the regular and the D&I posts.

[00:07:38] And they work better for D&I posts. So they don't work for regular posts, they were kind of neutral, but for D&I posts, they do work. In other words, they got more engagement. They got more engagement, yeah. What role did message length play in the effectiveness of diversity messaging? Should brands go for long form posts? Should they keep it short and simple?

[00:08:05] Brands that typically post longer, they're more likely to post about D&I. So that's what we find. But the D&I message itself should be shorter. We can only theorize why that is. Of course, it might be that there's more possibility for backlash if you try to explain why you are doing certain things or what is exactly happening, right? So I think just keeping it simple might apparently work already good here. Your data set was from then Twitter.

[00:08:34] It was a five-year period that ended in 2020. That was two years before Elon Musk bought the platform and well before political headwinds in the U.S. shifted. How do you think your results would be different if you had access to more recent data? Yeah, it might be different on some aspects, especially recently. There's more and more scrutiny maybe on these topics. Although I do have to say our data set covers a very wide variety of topics, right?

[00:09:02] And only a few of them are a little bit more controversial, right? I think specifically race and gender are a little bit more difficult, I guess, these days. But our research also covers disability, autism, being deaf, for example, age, things about veterans, for example.

[00:09:25] So I think all these topics are still being appreciated just as much or close to being just as much. So I think most of these results definitely hold for these less controversial topics. And maybe from the controversial topics, they might be a little bit less positive than we estimate here. I'm going to ask you a question that scientists don't like me asking because I know you didn't study it.

[00:09:49] But what does your gut tell you in terms of how communication around corporate diversity initiatives will change in the next few years? I mean, we see already that it's kind of rolling back some of these initiatives, right? So I think what some companies are doing might be too extreme. So, of course, I think the initial goal is not to have things such as racism.

[00:10:16] But then, on the other hand, if you're going too far in trying to force certain ratios, that's not being appreciated either, right? So companies are trying to might go a little bit far in trying to please one type of consumer and then having a backlash on the other type, right?

[00:10:34] So I think what you're seeing now in practice is that they're trying to roll it back a little bit, those extreme measures, but still trying to make sure that there's no bad practices going on. Well, it's very interesting research. I'm glad you could share it with us. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, you're welcome. Nick Bombay is co-author of Does Posting About Diversity and Inclusion Improve Social Media Engagement? It was published in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening.

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