Abstract

Background: This paper investigates how a university’s entrepreneurship center can tailor its LinkedIn page posts to create a supportive environment for entrepreneurs. Drawing on communication accommodation and social exchange theories, we examine post topics associated with higher engagement and textual differences among post topics that relate to community members’ engagement behaviors.

Method: We conducted an exploratory case study that combines quantitative analysis of LinkedIn posts with qualitative interviews. The case study centers on a capital region’s large public university’s entrepreneurship center. We downloaded for analysis the posts for one academic year from the entrepreneurship center official LinkedIn page. We also conducted interviews with 40 randomly selected members in this community. Finally, we identified the post topics via a pre-validated qualitative content analysis instrument. Textual analytics centered on readability, sentiment, level of detail, and repetition of long phrases.

Results: Major findings reveal that early-stage, first-time, and educationally disadvantaged founders constituted a large part of this startup ecosystem. The most effective post topics for stimulating high levels of engagement were monetary incentives, highlighting the entrepreneurship center’s old events, conveying the credibility of key employees, and promoting partner organizations’ upcoming related events. Although all posts regardless of topic lacked repeated long phrases, they were nevertheless best understood by college graduates. Finally, we found significant strong and medium positive relationships between post topics’ level of detail and community members’ engagement behaviors. However, this relationship between positive sentiment intensity and the same post topics was small.

Conclusion: Our findings enrich existing literature in communication accommodation and social exchange theories that have examined different post topics in different settings. We contribute to the extant literature by proposing new mechanisms of convergence to accommodate the needs of early-stage, first-time, and educationally disadvantaged founders in a startup ecosystem.

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