Abstract
The paper presents a corpus analysis of corporate communication on Twitter which was performed with a combination of metadata and textual data on the Janes-Tweet corpus. We compare the amount, posting dynamics and use of social-media specific communication elements by corporate and private users. Next, we analyse the language of corporate users. Our analysis shows that, in comparison to private accounts, corporate tweets predominantly use formal communication and standard language characteristics with seldom usage of informal and non-standard choices. In the event of those, however, they are chosen deliberately to address a specific target audience and meet the desired communicative goals. A major contribution of the paper is also a showcase of corpus-based approaches in communication studies, media studies and other related disciplines in social sciences which study language use.
Highlights
In the past decade, social media have evolved into a powerful tool, attracting millions of users every day
We look into the production, dynamics and language in the tweets of Slovene corporate users in order to identify the characteristics of such communication in contrast to the communication of private Twitter users
The research questions we address with each part of our study are: 1) Does corporate communication on Twitter by Slovene users have a distinct corporate profile in terms of posting dynamics and volume? 2) Have Slovene corporate users adopted the new media communication style and are using the features offered by the new media to maximize their reach and relationship strength? 3) Can we identify the Slovene corporate tweeting code?
Summary
Social media have evolved into a powerful tool, attracting millions of users every day (boyd and Ellison 2007). Social media can be used for customer service and market research (Weber 2009). With the growing commercial relevance of social media, researchers have begun to study the nature and influence of corporate communication on social media. Stelzner (2010) and Heaps (2009) showed that marketers use social media mainly for generating exposure for their business and increasing traffic to their corporate websites, rather than for selling products and services. In this paper we present the results of the first large-scale analysis of corporate communication on Twitter in Slovenia. The analysis was performed on the corpus Janes-Tweet (Erjavec et al 2018) by combining the available user and text metadata with the content of the tweets, which enabled a more accurate contextualization, parametrization, comparison and generalizations of language use in a specific communicative context. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 we present related work relevant for our study, in section 3, we present the results of the corpus analysis and Section 4 concludes the paper and outlines future work
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