Social Media, Social Approval, and Social Disapproval

This chapter first explores the shift in the social evaluation landscape due to the increasing popularity of social media, focusing on how organisations use these new forms of mass communication to manage constituent evaluations. Second, the chapter examines the complex set of actors that influence stakeholders, including the evolving role of information intermediaries who continue to affect social evaluations and the role of a new form of information intermediary: influencers. Third, it considers the power that social media users—including inauthentic users—wield to influence organisational social evaluations and performance. It then argues that two newly theorised social evaluations—social approval and disapproval—are well suited to study social media, as swift reactions to immediate events dominate evaluations on social media and reflect emotional, moral, and intuitive evaluations in ways that are not well explained by other social evaluations. Finally, the chapter suggests several future research directions. The dominance of social media as a type of communication media that connects billions of people globally stems from a recent and evolving set of forces, and thus, this research agenda is not only necessary but varied and vast. The agenda includes research on organisations’ proactive and reactive social media communication strategies, including disclosing the organisation’s stances on social and environmental issues, research on polarisation, fabricated narratives, and crises created on social media. Additional research is needed to better understand the effects of seemingly transient social media approval and disapproval on other, more durable social evaluations, including reputation, celebrity, infamy, legitimacy, and stigma.