Social media has become one of the most critical channels through which organizations engage stakeholders and shape public discourse. Yet, while much research focuses on what kind of content performs best, surprisingly little has examined how storytelling, specifically, drives meaningful engagement — particularly in the context of policymaking and corporate communications.
The study by Boeck et al. (2025) addresses this gap directly. Rather than examining storytelling in broad terms, the authors isolate its constituent elements — character, sequence of events, and setting — and test whether their presence in corporate social media posts correlates with higher stakeholder engagement. Drawing on Narrative Transportation Theory (NTT), which describes how audiences become cognitively and emotionally immersed in stories, the researchers used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to systematically analyze over 85,000 Facebook publications from 439 Canadian manufacturing companies and their 3.4 million associated reactions. Their findings confirm that each storytelling element independently increases engagement, and that combining them produces an even stronger effect — suggesting that well-structured narratives create a cumulative impact on audience interaction.
The study’s results offer several actionable insights for policymakers, marketers, and organizations seeking to strengthen their social media presence:
- Incorporate recognizable narrative structures into your content. Posts that included characters (such as named individuals or products), a clear sequence of events, and a defined setting all showed statistically significant increases in engagement. The setting category, in particular, produced the strongest individual correlation, underscoring the importance of grounding your content in a specific, identifiable context.
- Combine storytelling elements rather than relying on any single one. While each component contributed independently to engagement, the composite “story” variable — which captured posts containing all three elements together — yielded the highest correlation with stakeholder interaction. This synergistic effect suggests that audiences respond more strongly to content that reads as a cohesive narrative than to posts that include only isolated narrative cues.
- Leverage AI and NLP tools to evaluate and refine content strategy. The authors demonstrated that Natural Language Processing can effectively detect narrative elements in unstructured social media data at scale. For organizations managing high volumes of content, these tools offer a practical method for assessing whether posts contain the storytelling components most likely to drive engagement — without the need for manual coding.
- Be mindful of audience perception. The authors note that while products can function as characters within a narrative, their inclusion may also signal commercial intent, potentially triggering skepticism among audiences. Crafting stories that feel authentic rather than overtly promotional remains an important consideration when applying these findings.
Ultimately, this study reinforces a straightforward but often overlooked principle: storytelling is not just a stylistic choice — it is a measurable driver of engagement. For policymakers and organizations operating in an increasingly crowded digital landscape, the evidence suggests that investing in narrative-driven content is a practical and evidence-backed strategy for fostering deeper connections with stakeholders. As the authors note, future research will benefit from extending this framework to other platforms and languages, and from incorporating visual elements to capture the full complexity of modern social media communication.
SOURCE:
Boeck, H., Bourguignon, B., Hosseini Saravani, S. H., & Bahra, M. (2025). Evaluating the impact of storytelling elements on social media stakeholder engagement: An AI-driven approach. Data & Policy, 7: e62. https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2025.10029Evaluating the Impact of Storytelling Elements on Social Media Stakeholder Engagement: An AI-Driven Approach