Social media use in the Australian energy and resources sectors

Social media is becoming ubiquitous, but may not always be an effective way for companies to interact with their stakeholders. This paper reports the results of ongoing assessments of social media use in the Australian energy and resource sectors, starting from 2013. Nearly all energy and mining companies had publicly accessible websites but, although increasing, social media use is (still) relatively limited compared with other industries. LinkedIn (with a recruitment focus) was the social media channel most commonly adopted across the extractive sectors, although Twitter and YouTube are increasingly being adopted. Larger companies use more channels, post more and have more followers. In contrast, even small environmental and community groups frequently used a range of social media. Although this may suggest social media should be a place to engage such groups in dialogue, other recent studies suggest that, in practice, social media platforms are often difficult venues to do this, not least because companies cannot control the directions of conversations. For example, customers of utility companies frequently use social media to bypass official grievance mechanisms, which, over time, has apparently led to demand-driven increases in resourcing needed to deal with this. In addition to providing an industry-wide benchmark of social media use, these surveys provide a basis for comparison with other industries to understand what role social media could have in better engaging stakeholders associated with the extractive sectors.