ESG In Social Media
What is ESG?
ESG is an acronym that stands for Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance and is used to describe how conscientious a business, firm, group, collective, or any other type of organization is in regard to social and environmental factors. It’s typically expressed as a number, scored from one to one hundred with higher scores representing organizations that are more attentive to social and environmental factors and lower scores representing those with practices that aren’t as mindful. The ESG reporting to arrive at these scores is done with the help of a wide variety of metrics related to intangible assets within the enterprise. Issues such as carbon emissions, pollution, waste, political contributions, diversity, shareholders’ rights and more are all evaluated to produce an organization’s ESG score. Business leaders increasingly rely on ESG reporting when making decisions, both short and long-term.
Why is ESG Important?
Obviously, many of the elements that influence an organization’s ESG rating – diversity, use of renewable energy, and low carbon emissions just to name a few – are goals that they should strive towards as a matter of routine but, as the world becomes increasingly socially and environmentally conscious, an organization’s fundamental success is contingent upon many of these considerations. Much of what factors into ESG reporting is becoming an increasingly large focus in decision making for consumers, and while ESG likely won’t be the sole reason why consumers choose to purchase a product it’ll most certainly have an impact. ESG reporting is also factoring into business-to-business partnerships and relationships, as institutional investors, asset managers, and other stakeholders all factor in ESG when making critical decisions.
ESG is also an invaluable tool to measure how successful your organization is at keeping its promises. Perhaps you’ve made it part of your company’s mission to reduce your carbon footprint, or maybe you’ve made it a point to implement more inclusive hiring practices. ESG reporting will tell you how well you’re doing in these areas and where you might lacking in the metrics you deem important. Low scores can serve as motivation to improve and high scores can be cause for recognition. With ESG reporting, you get the insights to make data-driven decisions that’ll help your organization meet its goals and grow to meet our changing times.
Ways You Can Use Social Media to Promote Your ESG Initiatives
1. Storytelling
Although social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat cater more towards quickly consumable content, there are still ways to tell a compelling story. Both Instagram and Snapchat have features literally named “story” and these can be used to create more engaging, longer-form content than a simple post. In these stories you can highlight your organization’s ESG score and provide an explanation of the practices you take that contributed to it. You can also tell stories about individual customers or clients, or your own employees, and how they contribute to your organization’s ESG rating. Showcasing ESG in social media is a well that’s largely untapped, so you may stumble upon something that goes viral.
2. Utilize video
When telling a story with ESG in social media, video is essential. Since your story will not be as quickly consumable as most of the content on social media, you’ll want to keep users engaged, and video is far more engrossing than a still image. These videos might depict interviews with people in your organization explaining why they believe ESG is important, footage of some of your practices that awarded you a high ESG score, an explanation of why your organization prioritizes the issues that it does, and anything else that you feel your followers and other users would find motivational.
3. Consistent posting
By consistently posting about your ESG initiatives, you’ll be making consumers and other organizations aware of your leadership in the field and, as alluded to earlier, this information can translate into potential sales and new business partnership opportunities.
4. Transparency
You would think that social media promotes transparency since it gives us a window into the lives of our favorite celebrities and a way to connect with companies and organizations like never before but, in reality, it often accomplishes the opposite. Because people can carefully curate and control what parts of their lives and which parts of their business operations they share with the world, most social media posts are equivalent to the polished branding companies have always employed in their marketing strategies. However, you can bring some transparency to these platforms by telling stories about the practices that factored into your organization’s ESG commitment and share the unfiltered thoughts of your members about these concerns that affect us all in both our professional as well as our personal lives.
How ImpactWayv's Social Media Platform Promotes ESG Transparency
ImpactWayv provides its users with an unprecedented opportunity to highlight and share the critical aspects of your organization’s social responsibility initiatives with the world. By sharing your ESG practices on a social media platform dedicated to social good causes, you can benefit from an enhanced reputation, better sales and more meaningful and productive business partnerships. ImpactWayv gives you the opportunity to highlight and scale critical aspects of your business’ social responsibility resulting in enhanced reputation, trust, loyalty, authenticity, transparency and brand image. ImpactWayv provides an unrivaled suite of services to for-profits and nonprofits relating to the world of social impact, with a view toward delivering greater purpose and meaning to investing, giving and receiving.