The global coronavirus pandemic has reignited a strategic debate among the business community of the necessity for corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement in the ever-dynamic social media. Considering the global economic downturn introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the present research is devoted to investigating whether CSR engagement in social media can help DiDi (a Chinese shared brand) at stake survive this overwhelming crisis. A theoretical model proposed to describe the hypothesized relationships was tested by a Structural Equation Modeling technique through the empirical online questionnaire. Through findings, we demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between CSR engagement of DiDi on WeChat, customer–company identification (C–C identification), and behavioral intention [purchase intention, brand loyalty, and e-word-of-mouth (eWOM)] of customers. With attention to psychological influence, our empirical statistics also evidenced the mediating role of C-C identification between CSR engagement and behavioral intention of customers. This study highlights the significant role of CSR engagement in a critical period theoretically and offers businesses more open innovation strategies to compete against the COVID-19 pandemic-induced market downturn.

In view of the dramatic changes induced by emerging social media, the present research focuses on Chinese multinational enterprises to understand how they conduct impression management work on Twitter through different face orientations, with a particular attention to the online presence of CSR activities. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, it is found that CSR activities have not received enough attention in such genre of company discourse. The present research also points that the frequent occurrence at Twitter is supposed to be of great value to impression management work of these multinational companies. However, some disparities also emerge in their face orientation across different industry.