CSR Communication on Instagram: Exploring CSR Signals and Countersignals in a Visually-Oriented Social Media Platform

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication is increasingly pursued in interactive form over social media. This has given rise to research on the effectiveness of social media CSR posts. Most of this research considers Twitter and Facebook, while recent visual social media such as Instagram (IG) are yet underexplored. By referring to signaling theory, this paper explores the effects of both IG CSR posts (signals) and their components (CSR image and text) on user engagement in the form of likes and comments (countersignals). A computational research approach was employed to scrape 39'400 IG posts with associated audience engagement information in terms of likes and comments (544,031) of 394 companies. The data analysis reveals that compared to non-CSR posts, CSR posts tend to result in a lower number of likes and comments and an increase in the proportion of negative comments. However, this negative effect of CSR communication on IG seems to vary between companies and across industries considerably, thus suggesting that CSR communication effectiveness is not only a function of CSR post features, but also users' perceptions about business entities. With these insights, the paper adds to the knowledge about the effects of CSR posts in visual-oriented social media and provides guidelines on how to design effective IG CSR posts.