V prispevku predstavimo korpusno analizo korporativnega
komuniciranja na družbenem omrežju Twitter, ki smo jo s kombinacijo
besedilnih in metapodatkov izvedli na korpusu Janes-Tweet. Analizirali smo
značilnosti slovenskih korporativnih računov in dinamiko njihovih objav ter
analizirali rabo novomedijskih elementov in uporabljenega jezika v
korporativnih objavah. Na koncu smo proučili še ključne besede v
korporativnih objavah. Izvedene analize so pokazale, da v primerjavi z
zasebnimi računi v korporativnih tvitih izrazito prevladujejo standardne
jezikovne prvine formalnega sporočanja, sicer redkejše neformalne in
nestandardne izbire pa so uporabljene premišljeno glede na naslovnika
sporočila in namen sporočanja. Prispevek je dragocen tudi zato, ker
demonstrira potencial korpusnih pristopov v komunikologiji, medijskih
študijah in drugih sorodnih družboslovnih disciplinah, ki proučujejo
jezikovno rabo.
Ključne besede: korporativno komuniciranje, družbena omrežja,
Twitter, korpusna analiza
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 Slovene 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.
Keywords: corporate communication,
social media, Twitter, corpus analysis
In the past decade, social media have evolved into a powerful tool, attracting millions of users every day (Boyd and Ellison 2007). Jansen et al. (2010) have shown that around 20 percent of all published tweets mentioned or expressed their opinion about an organization, brand, product or service. What is more, Wu et al. (2011) show that this new form of electronic word-of-mouth is approximately 20 times more effective than marketing events and 30 times more effective than media appearances. It is therefore unsurprising to see such a rapid growth of the online social media marketing (Griffiths and McLean 2014) through which companies address a wide range of goals, such as increased traffic and brand awareness, improved search engine rankings or increased sales (Thoring 2011). In addition, social media can also 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. Researchers who investigate the patterns of how information spreads through the Twitter network showed that tweets which contain URLs tend to spread faster (Park et al. 2012) and that tweets containing words which indicate either positive or negative sentiment tend to receive more retweets than neutral posts (Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan 2012). 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. Evidence has also been found that social media have a positive effect on increasing relational outcomes, such as online reputation and relationship strength (Clark and Melancon 2013; Li et al. 2013; Miller and Tucker 2013). It is therefore surprising that while the new platform of engagement with customers has shifted the company–customer discourse, Mangold and Faulds (2009) show that communication is still predominantly scripted, promotion-centric and lacks real interaction with the customers.
In this paper we present the results of the first large-scale analysis of corporate communication on Twitter in Slovenia. 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. In our study, we use the term corporate account for all private companies, public institutions, the media and interest associations who do not post as individuals for leisure purposes. 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.
In communication studies, three main strands of research into corporate social media communication practices can be identified. The first group focuses on investigating posting behaviour, the second looks into content analysis, and the third are perception studies. In terms of research focus, investigators are mostly interested in corporate communication styles, reputation management and corporate social responsibility.
Quantitative differences in communication dynamics, style and content of Slovene private and corporate Twitter users have been identified by Ljubešić and Fišer (2016) and have been attributed to the different communication functions of private and corporate social media users. While corporate users mostly tweet during the work week in the morning, private users are more active during weekends and in the evening. Corporate tweets have distinctly positive sentiment, while private tweets are predominantly neutral. Tweets posted by corporate users are retweeted much more often while private tweets are more frequently favourited.
By analyzing tweet frequency, following behavior, hyperlinks, hashtags, mentions and retweets, several studies have shown that one-way communication is still the most common communication strategy used by organizations on Twitter (Waters and Jamal 2011; Xifra and Grau 2010) and that the style and genre in tweets by PR professionals is the same as in other PR text types, treating social media as yet another channel for reaching a different consumer segment, without adapting their language accordingly (Kalin Golob et al. 2018). However, as shown by Kwon and Sung (2011), the growing frequency of imperative verb phrases, such as "follow the brand," "come by the booth," "join us at the event," or "sign up" for a planned occasion, suggest that corporations increasingly use Twitter as a tool to initiate and maintain relationships with consumers. Risius and Beck (2015) empirically identified social media activities in terms of social media management strategies (using social media management tools or the web-frontend client), account types (broadcasting or receiving information), and communicative approaches (conversational or disseminative). They found positive effects of social media management tools, broadcasting accounts, and conversational communication on public perception. Company account characteristics that have been found to influence public perception are verification, friends, and status.
Gomez and Chalmeta (2013) used content analysis to look into corporate social responsibility (CSR) on social media and have identified presentation, content, and interactivity as the key resources for CSR communication on social media. Presentation refers to the different tools and basic information that supports the company’s CSR presence on social media. Content includes messages related to CSR and other topics that reinforce the communication of CSR practices. Interactivity refers to the type of CSR communication and the frequency of CSR messages and feedback.
Li et al. (2013) used social identity theory to identify design factors that determine the social context of a corporate Twitter channel and users’ social identification with the community. They confirm that user engagement and informedness in a corporate Twitter channel have a positive effect on corporate reputation and that the credibility of the corporate Twitter channel has a positive effect on user informedness about the corporation. An interesting finding is that deeper relationships among users of a corporate Twitter channel result in higher user engagement and informedness when the level of corporate involvement with the channel is high and the channel has a specific purpose but that the opposite is true when the channel has a generic purpose.
In the related work, post harvesting is typically tailor-made and small-scale, either focused on a few carefully selected corporate social media accounts (e.g. 3 companies), or limited to a carefully designed time span (e.g. 1 month). Coding of the observed phenomena is manual. The research framework is quantitative but done on a relatively small scale, and experimental in that research hypotheses are confirmed or rejected with statistical tests. Our work differs from this research framework in that we use an existing large corpus of tweets and are interested in the characteristics of all the available corporate accounts in it. While coding of certain phenomena (e.g. account type, user gender) was manual, it was performed prior to this study by coders unrelated to this study, so could not be fully controlled. Coding of many other phenomena (e.g. language, sentiment and standardness level of tweets) was automatic and therefore contains a certain degree of noise. Our approach is not only quantitative but large scale as well, taking into account several thousands of users and several million of their tweets, and is descriptive in nature. What is more, unlike most related work which mostly observe the metadata (e.g. tweet frequency, following behavior, retweets) or content of the messages (e.g. hyperlinks, hashtags, mentions, sentiment), we also perform an analysis of the language used in the messages, which is still underresearched in communication studies. A better understanding of the language practices used by public companies and institutions for presentation, persuasion and reputation management on social media will contribute towards a comprehensive understanding of contemporary, technology-enhanced corporate public relations and marketing strategies and practices. Finally, while most researchers focus almost exlusively on English, our study is performed on Slovene which can serve as a showcase for other languages with a smaller number of speakers (and therefore a smaller market size the corporate accounts are serving).
The analysis has been performed on the Janes-Tweet corpus (Erjavec et al. 2018) consisting of 11.3 million Slovene tweets or 160 million tokens published by more than 10,200 users. Depending on their communication purpose, users in the corpus are manually divided into two groups: private and corporate. Corporate accounts comprise all private companies, public institutions, the media and interest associations who do not post as individuals for leisure purposes, who are treated as private accounts. In order to establish the characteristics of corporate communication on Twitter and differentiate them from the common practices typical of this medium in general, we perform a contrastive analysis of these two types of accounts.
Our study consists of three parts, each of which addresses a major segment of
communication styles on Twitter, ranging from the analysis of communication
dynamics and metadata to the content and language analysis, observed from the
perspective of the two types of accounts. First, we analyzed the production and
posting dynamics of these two user groups. Next, we analyzed the use of social
media-specific communication elements, such as hashtags, emojis and emoticons.
Finally, we analyzed the language and keywords used in corporate tweets. All the
analyses were performed in the SketchEngine corpus-analysis
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?
Share of users. The ratio between
private to corporate users in the corpus is 3:1. As can be seen in Table 1,
less than a fifth of all the tweets in the corpus have been posted by
corporate users. This means that in Slovenia, Twitter is mainly used for
private communication.
Users’ gender. As shown in Table 2, gender could not be
determined for the majority of corporate users (82%) based on user name,
user profile data and verb form usage in their tweets, which is rare in the
case of private users (1.5%). This is unsurprising because corporate users
tweet on behalf of their company or organization, adapting their style of
writing accordingly, e.g. the use of first person plural verb forms, which
do not distinguish the gender of the writer.
Post quantity. There are only 29
(1%) corporate users who are very active on social media and have posted
over 10,000 tweets, and 422 (16%) medium-active ones with 1,000 – 10,000
tweets. The majority of corporate users (1,640 or 62.79%) fall into the
category of low-activity accounts with 100 – 1,000 tweets. The
lowest-activity group includes 521 users (19.95%) who have posted fewer than
100 tweets. In comparison to private users, the biggest difference is in
groups 2 and 4. There are 9% more private users with 1,000 – 10,000 tweets
and a similar percentage fewer private accounts with only 100 – 1,000
tweets. In the years included in the Janes-Tweet corpus, the volume of
content generated by the corporate users is stable but is decreasing
slightly among the private users (see Figure 1). Occasional sharp drops in
the number of posts, which are simultaneous for both user groups, were
caused by the technical issues during data collection and are not related to
the seasonal fluctuations or other content-related phenomena.
Post length. Figure 2 shows that
the length of corporate tweets is more homogenous than the length of private
tweets. The biggest share of corporate tweets are 7 to 11 words long (4 to 7
words in case of private users). The share of corporate tweets which do not
contain any word (only emojis, hashtags, hyperlinks or multimedia elements)
is only 0.1%. Such tweets are six times more frequently produced by private
users, which is not surprising as these symbols are typically used in
bidirectional communication, which is rare in corporate PR tweets.
Likes. As can be seen from Table 4, nearly 80% of
corporate tweets do not receive any likes, 12% have one like and only 9%
have 2 or more likes. Private tweets receive significantly different
attention: a third of all the private tweets is liked at least once and a
significant share of them (0.7%) receives over 10 likes. This is another
strong sign that bidirectional communication is less typical of corporate
users and that corporate tweets are just one of the channels of the same
type of (one-directional) communication disseminated through different
genres.
Retweets. Retweeting results show a different picture
where a much greater share of corporate tweets have at least one retweet
(17%) in comparison to private tweets (8%), suggesting a higher informative
value of corporate tweets for a wider audience. Interestingly, when
considering very frequently retweeted posts, no difference between the two
account types has been observed.
Use of hashtags. Relatively
speaking, corporate accounts use hashtags almost twice as often as private
accounts. On average, almost every second corporate tweet contains a
hashtag, which holds for only every fourth private tweet. As presented in
Table 5, sport is the predominant topic of the 10 most frequent hashtags
used by corporate users which is very similar to private users.
Interestingly, half of the 10 most frequently used hashtags are shared
(sport, news, Ljubljana). Among the 10 corporate users with the highest
relative frequency of hashtag use we can find less formal magazines and
companies. Therefore, for a more detailed analysis of corporate
communication it would be interesting to further divide corporate users into
different groups: media (journals and magazines), companies, state
institutions and non-governmental organizations. We plan to include this in
our future studies.
Use of emoticons and emojis.
As presented in Table 6, all of the most frequently used emojis or emoticons are positive which again indicates a positive tone in PR communication. However, it is interesting that only 2 emojis appear on the top 10 list for corporate users while the rest are emoticons. This could be a sign of more conservative communication strategies used by corporate users given that emojis are a much more recent phenomenon, but this could also be a consequence of corporate users more frequently tweeting from their computers rather than smart phones which better support the use of emojis.
Use of hyperlinks. Great
differences between private and corporate users can be observed in their use
of hyperlinks in tweets. Relatively speaking, corporate tweets contain more
than three times the number of hyperlinks in comparison to private tweets.
On average, corporate users add a hyperlink to nearly each tweet they post,
while private users include it only in every fourth tweet. This corresponds
to the findings of our preliminary analysis that tweets are often only
compressed press releases leading to a complete message in the form of a
hyperlink.
Mentions of other users. Big
differences between private and corporate users are observed in the rate and
type of other user accounts mentions. Relatively speaking, mentions are more
than twice as frequent in private tweets as they are in corporate tweets. On
average, private users mention other users in every tweet, whereas corporate
users use this option only in every third message. This is not surprising
because the main objective of PR tweets is self-presentation, which is why
referencing others is less needed. Among the 10 most frequently mentioned
accounts in corporate tweets are mainly media, political
institutions/parties/individual politicians and sport organizations, while
in private tweets we find social media influencers, two journalists and a
politician. Both lists have only two mentions in common, i.e. YouTube and
Janez Janša, one of the oldest and best known Slovenian politicians.
Language of tweets. Corporate
users almost exclusively post messages in Slovene (93%), which is
considerably different from private users whose share of tweets in a foreign
language is twice as large. Among the foreign languages used in tweets of
corporate users, English prevails (5%). This corresponds to our preliminary
findings that the main goal of Slovene corporate Twitter users is to address
their Slovene audience through formal communication for business or
informative purposes. The only exception are the accounts of Slovene
Embassies around the world often posting in their local language (e.g. in
French), as well as the accounts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the
president and the prime minister who occasionally use English tweets to
inform the international community about major events (e.g. arbitration).
Sentiment of tweets. Every tweet
in the corpus is annotated with a sentiment label (see Erjavec et al. 2018).
Half of all corporate tweets have positive sentiment, a third has neutral
sentiment and 17% of the tweets have negative sentiment. This greatly
differs from private tweets, half of which are neutral, 27% negative and
only a quarter positive. This is another indication of the PR nature of
corporate tweets which try to convey a positive corporate image, attract
customers, sell products, etc.
Language standardness. Tweets by
corporate users mainly contain standard Slovene (80%) and highly nonstandard
content is only rarely present (3%). Almost the opposite is true of private
users. Less than half of their tweets are written in standard Slovene and
the share of tweets containing highly nonstandard Slovene is more than four
times greater in comparison to corporate users. Some exceptions can be found
among the accounts of public personalities (e.g. stand-up comics, radio
presenters, musicians) who often purposefully tweet in nonstandard Slovene
because informal communication is a major part of their corporate image.
Orthography. Great differences are detected regarding
the use of abbreviations: corporate tweets mainly contain standard
abbreviations of academic or other titles (dr., mag., d.
o. o.) and common abbreviations (št., oz.,
min.), while in private tweets we find nonstandard abbreviations
(tw), often without full stop (slo, lj, min).
Some differences can be also observed in the use of
punctuation. In corporate accounts, a bigger range of classic punctuation
marks is used according to the orthographic norm. Tweets by private users
are characterized by frequent repetitions of the same punctuation mark to
give the message an emotional charge. Much more frequent is also the use of
social-media specific symbols (#, @, *).
Parts of speech. The analysis of
the parts of speech in the language of corporate tweets offers an insight
into communication purposes of corporate accounts. Relatively speaking,
there are almost twice as many proper nouns and numerals in corporate tweets
than in private ones. Much more frequent are also conjunctions,
prepositions, adjectives and common nouns. As shown in Table 10,
interjections are considerably more often present in private accounts (3.5
times more). The same is true for particles (almost 2 times more), pronouns
and adverbs. On the one hand this confirms a greater formality of corporate
users and reflects a more direct and personal approach of private users. On
the other hand this also reflects different communicative functions of
Twitter: informative for corporate and conversational for private accounts.
Furthermore, the informative, as well as the influencing function to some
extent, are also confirmed by the detailed analysis of individual parts of
speech presented below.
The noun. Common nouns are 1.5
times more common in corporate tweets than in private ones, but the matching
rate of the first 20 common nouns that are most frequently used is
surprisingly high (70%): dan/day, leto/year, tekma/race,
ura/hour, mesto/place, teden/week, čas/time, hvala/thank you,
svet/world, delo/work, človek/human, konec/end, otrok/child,
država/country. Among the 20 most frequent nouns, the following are
specific to corporate tweets: video/video, foto/photo,
zmaga/victory, novica/news, cena/price, sezona/season. Proper nouns
are twice as common in corporate tweets than in the private ones and the
matching rate of the 20 most frequent nouns is 40%: Slovenija/Slovenia, Ljubljana, Maribor, EU, Slovenc/Slovene,
Evropa/Europe, ZDA/USA, Cerar, Janša. Among the 20 most frequent
nouns, the following proper nouns are corporate tweets: Olimpija, Koper, Peter, Gorica, Janez, Domžale, Luka, Tina,
Marko.
In corporate tweets a higher level of formality of expression has been
detected as both first and last names are indicated (private tweets mention
only the last name). Furthermore, we can observe greater diversity of places
and company names. An analysis of nominal pronouns returned predictable
results: corporate tweets contain plural pronouns (nam/to
us, nas/us, vam/to you), while in private
tweets we find singular forms of pronouns (jaz/I, me/of
me, ti/to you, te/you). The reason for grammatical plurality lies
in the fact that authors of corporate tweets use formal communication
methods on behalf of their institution or company and formal form of
addressing.
The verb. The use of main verbs is
more common in private tweets. The matching rate of the 20 most frequent
verbs in private and corporate tweets is 60% (imeti/have,
iti/go, morati/must, vedeti/know, videte/see, priti/come, dobiti/get,
začeti/begin, čakati/wait, dati/give, praviti/say, delati/work,
dobiti/get), but the difference lies in their motivation for
communication: corporate accounts mainly report on events and publish
statements, while private accounts describe personal activities and give
opinions. Among the 20 most frequent verbs, the following main verbs are
specific to corporate tweets: želeti/wish,
preveriti/check, najti/find, iskati/search, prebrati/read,
gledati/watch, moči/able, hoteti/want, narediti/do.
The adjective. Adjectives are 1.5
times more frequently used in corporate than in private tweets and the
matching rate of the 20 most used adjectives is 50%: nov/new, dober/good, slovenski/Slovenian, velik/big, lep/beautiful,
zadnji/last, mlad/young, star/old, pravi/real, super/super. Among
the 20 most frequent adjectives the following are specific to corporate
tweets: vabljen/invited, današnji/today’s,
evropski/European, javen/public, spleten/web/based, svetoven/world/wide,
odličen/excellent, državen/national, visok/high, domač/domestic.
Positive adjectives are characteristic of corporate tweets (nov/new, dober/good, velik/big, lep/beautiful) which
are also more formal than the adjectives characteristic of private tweets
(vabljen/invited, odličen/excellent, visok/high
vs. hud/badass, mali/little, sam/alone). Adjectival
as well as nominal pronouns are used in the first person plural form in
corporate tweets (naše/our-Female, naši/our-Male)
when the goal is identification with the company or the institution and
integration into the communicative circle that connects the author of the
message on behalf of the institution with the recipient (Korošec 1998).
The particle. The difference
between formality and informality can also be observed through particles
which overlap in 80% of the cases. However, among the particles that are
present only in tweets of one user group, our analysis showed that formal
particles are distinctive for corporate tweets (morda/maybe, predvsem/above all, sicer/though, skoraj/nearly) and
nonstandard and informal particles for private tweets (tud
< tudi/also; ze < že/already, itak/off course, pač/well).
The interjection. As already
mentioned, the analysis of this part of speech showed most notable
differences. The matching rate of the 20 most common interjections in
corporate and private tweets is 55%: bravo, hm, haha, uf,
o, ej, ah, ha, aha, aja, oh. Among the most frequent interjections
that are distinctive for one of the user groups are the following ones: živjo, zdravo, hej, hehe, gooool, opa, ups, na, ojoj.
Interjections in corporate tweets are fewer in quantity as well as more
formal and salutatory (zdravo, ups), while private
tweets often contain interjections in foreign language (btw, lol) and swear words.
This section highlights the results of the keyword analysis performed on corporate tweets. In this paper, the keywords are understood as the words which are unexpectedly more frequent in the tweets of corporate users compared to the entire Janes-Tweet corpus as reference.
Sentiment. As shown in Table 13,
the highest keyness index is attributed to lexis from corporate tweets with
negative sentiment. Among those, all 20 top-ranking key lemmas are part of
media tweets that reference reports on crime and other accidents (e.g.,
trčenje/collision, evakuirati/evacuate, ranjen/injured,
nesreča/accident). The 20 top-ranking keywords with positive
sentiment correspond to the definitions of positive PR communication (e.g.,
čestitka/congratulations, vabljen/invited,
bravo/bravo, čudovit/wonderful, polepšati/make sbd’s (day)).
Adjectives and adverbs with highly positive meaning are also ranked high
(e.g., lep/beautiful, odličen, odlično/fantastic,
prijeten/nice, super/super). Furthermore, the 20 top-ranking
keywords with neutral sentiment are part of the tweets containing media
reports (e.g., novice.si/news.si, zemljišče/property,
napovednik/preview, sklepen/final) and denote events (e.g., pivniški/beer, ebel/ebel, šloganje/card-reading,
prerokovanje/fortune-telling) or names (katarinin, ebel, zoofa, apod). This list suggests that for a more
fine-grained analysis of corporate communication on Twitter it could be
useful to consider separating the tweets generated by media from those that
are created by companies or institutions.
Standardness. A comparison of the
30 top-ranking key word forms (see Table 14) in corporate tweets written in
standard and nonstandard Slovene shows that users write in standard Slovene
when posting notifications and adds (e.g., dražba/auction,
ugodne/good, zamudite/miss, preverite/check). Tweets written in
nonstandard Slovene have a similar communication purpose, but numerous
elements in foreign language and nonstandard spelling of Slovene words
indicate that authors of such messages want to establish a closer connection
with their target audience and make their offer more appealing to them (e.g.
deejaytime/phoneticized spelling of DJ/time, hajskul –
phoneticized spelling of high school, najbrš – nonstandard for I guess,
pridte –nonstandard for come, dm – abbreviation for direct message,
javiš – nonstandard for answer).
Gender. While a comparison of the
key word forms from female or male corporate accounts in Table 15 does not
offer any insights into possible linguistic differences between them, it
does give us information about differences in topics and style in regard to
language choices made when addressing female or male target audience. Female
accounts include names of magazines, URLs and proper names related to
fashion, shopping, food and parenting, while in male account these elements
are related to real estate, sport and music.
Social media have revolutionized corporate communications by allowing companies to communicate directly and instantly with their stakeholders, marking a shift from the traditional one-way output of corporate communications, to an expanded dialogue between company and consumer (Matthews 2010). This paper presents the results of the first comprehensive, large-scale and corpus-driven analysis of the characteristics of corporate communication on Twitter in Slovenia that could serve as a starting-point of further, data-driven and linguistically enhanced investigations of the importance of social media for fostering corporate communication. In the study, we combined the analysis of the available metadata, Tweet content and corpus annotations to study three key aspects of the communication of Slovene corporate Twitter users: (1) the participation, posting dynamics and posting volume, (2) the utilization of new media elements, and (3) the language choices observed through several levels of linguistic discription.
Based on the Janes-Tweet corpus, Twitter appears to be mainly used for private communication in Slovenia. The majority of corporate accounts belong to the low-activity category but the volume of content generated by the corporate users is stable. Corporate tweets are more homogenous length-wise and are predominantly longer than those of private users.
The analysis of the usage of the new media elements suggests that corporate tweets come short of the true dialogic approach as most Slovene companies and institutions use Twitter as yet another channel for unidirectional communication of regular (shortened) PR messages, while the prevalent communication function remains informative and positively presentational. This can be seen from a much less frequent usage of emoticons and all other interactive elements typical of private accounts, which display a distinct conversational communication function that can be seen in their frequent usage of non-standard particles, interjections, punctuation and language, and a large number of favourites.
A very strong feature of corporate communication is the almost exclusive usage of Slovene which is undoubtedly strategic with a clear focus on the Slovene market. While standard language and formal elements do prevail in corporate tweets of Slovene companies and institutions, the infrequent occurrences of informal and non-standard elements seem to be used deliberately and tailored to the specific target audience, which points towards a growing awareness of adapting the style to the content that is communicated (level of formality, linguistic standardness, discursiveness), target audience (general public – neutral style vs. specific public – variations between neutral and colloquial style) and the organization profile (public institution – neutral style, standard language, companies – visible, colloquial, non-standard features).
Both sentiment- and part-of-speech-based keyword analyses show an interesting landscape of corporate tweets. The usage of evaluative adjectives is prominent throughout this subcorpus, among which superlatives stands out in particular. The negative keywords originate from the coverage of accidents and crimes by the media, and the positive fully correspond with the definition of promotional elements. These results indicate an important difference between the negative reporting-style tweets by the news outlets, and the positive promotional style of companies, public institutions and non-governmental institutions, suggesting the need for a more fine-grained categorization of corporate accounts, which will be refined in our future work. We also plan to focus on analyzing the reception of corporate tweets which contain non-standard language and interactive elements which are more typical of private communication on social media.
An important original contribution of this study is its demonstration of the methodological potential of corpus approaches in communication studies, media studies and related disciplines in social sciences which are based on language data, which is not yet utilized in the Slovene context. Apart from theoretical relevance, the results of this analysis therefore also have practical implications for PR practitioners and organizations in that they reinforce the importance of properly trained PR practitioners who use social media in a dialogic, two-way symmetrical model, understand their role as boundary spanners and the need to seek opportunities to engage in and stimulate dialogue with stakeholders. The results of our study also clearly illustrate to the PR practitioners that social media should not be treated as just another means through which to disseminate the same advertisements and publicity pieces that stakeholders are already receiving through other traditional media channels. According to Matthews (2010), social media offers an opportunity for direct and instant corporate communication as well as an opportunity to get back to the ideal basics of public relations – building and maintaining relationships – and to change some of the negative stereotypes typically associated with the industry.
The work described in this paper was funded by the Slovenian Research Agency within the national basic research project “Resources, methods, and tools for the understanding, identification, and classification of various forms of socially unacceptable discourse in the information society” (J7-8280, 2017-2019) and the Slovenian-Flemish bilateral basic research project “Linguistic landscape of hate speech on social media” (N06-0099, 2019 – 2023).
Journal of Computer
‐
Mediated Communication13 (1): 210–30. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x.
International Journal of Marketing Studies5 (4): 132–42. doi:10.5539/ijms.v5n4p132.
Viri, orodja in metode za analizo spletne slovenščine, edited by Darja Fišer, 16–43. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete.
16
th
International Public Relations Research Conference, 1–16. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
UKAIS International Conference Proceedings 2014, 1–51. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ukais2014/51.
Corporate Governance Advisor17 (6): 18–22.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology60 (11): 2169–88. doi:10.1002/asi.21149.
Pisanje za odnose z javnostmi: temeljni žanri. Ljubljana: Založba FDV.
Lexicography1 (1): 7–36. doi:10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9.
Stilistika slovenskega poročevalstva.Ljubljana: ČZD Kmečki glas.
Journal of Interactive Advertising12 (1): 4–16. doi:10.1080/15252019.2011.10722187.
International Journal of Electronic Commerce18 (2): 97–126. doi:10.2753/JEC1086-4415180204.
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities, edited by Darja Fišer and Michael Beißwenger, 39–43. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani.
Business Horizons52 (4): 357–65. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2009.03.002.
The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications1 (1): 17–23.
Information Systems Research24 (1): 52–70. doi:10.1287/isre.1120.0466.
Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Relations Review,409–11.
Information & Management52 (7): 824–39. doi:10.1016/j.im.2015.06.004.
ECIS 2012 Proceedings.Accessed February 15, 2019. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2012.
Publishing Research Quarterly27 (2): 141–58. doi:10.1007/s12109-011-9214-7.
Public Relations Review37 (3): 321–24. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2011.03.002.
Marketing on the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
Proceedings of the WWW’11 Conference, 705–14. New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/1963405.1963504.
Public Relations Review36 (2): 171–74. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.02.005.
In the past decade, social media have transformed corporate communications by enabling direct and instant communication with the stakeholders. In communication studies, three main strands of research into corporate communication practices on social media can be identified: posting behaviour, content analysis and perception studies. Investigators are mostly interested in corporate communication styles, reputation management and corporate social responsibility. A better understanding of the language practices used by public companies and institutions for presentation, persuasion and reputation management on social media is still lacking.
This paper addresses this gap with the first comprehensive, large-scale and corpus-driven analysis of the characteristics of corporate communication on Twitter in Slovenia. In the study, we combined the analysis of the available metadata, Tweet content and corpus annotations in the Janes-Tweet corpus to study three key aspects of the communication of Slovene corporate Twitter users: (1) their participation, posting dynamics and posting volume, (2) the use of social-media specific communication elements, and (3) the language choices observed through several levels of linguistic discription.
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. The analysis of the utilisation of the new media elements by corporate users clearly show that their tweets come short of the true dialogic approach and that most Slovene companies and institutions use Twitter as yet another channel for unidirectional communication of regular (shortened) PR messages in which the prevalent communication function remains informative and positively presentational. A keyword analysis reveals an important difference between the negative reporting-style tweets by the news outlets, and the positive promotional style of companies, public institutions and non-governmental institutions, suggesting the need for a more fine-grained categorization of corporate accounts, which will be refined in our future work.
Another major contribution of the paper is its demonstration of the methodological potential of corpus approaches in communication studies, media studies and related disciplines in social sciences that are based on language data, which is not yet utilized in the Slovene context. Apart from theoretical relevance, the results of this analysis therefore also have practical implications for the PR community which highlight the importance of properly trained PR practitioners who use social media in a dialogic, symmetrical model, understand their role as boundary spanners and the need to seek opportunities to engage in and stimulate dialogue with their stakeholders.
V zadnjem desetletju so z omogočanjem neposrednega in takojšnjega stika z deležniki družbena omrežja močno vplivala tudi na korporativno kominiciranje. V komunikologiji korporativne komunikacijske prakse na družbenih omrežjih raziskujejo z opazovanjem vedenja korporativnih uporabnikov, analizo vsebine in percepcijskimi študijami. Komunikologe zanimajo predvsem slogi poslovnega sporočanja, upravljanje ugleda in družbena odgovornost podjetij, medtem ko še vedno primanjkujejo jezikoslovno usmerjene raziskave, ki bi omogočile boljše razumevanje jezikovnih praks, ki jih podjetja in institucije uporabljajo za predstavljanje svojih izdelkov, vplivanje na potrošnike in odzivanje v kritičnih situacijah.
To vrzel naslavlja pričujoči prispevek, v katerem predstavimo prvo celovito, na obsežnem korpusu zasnovano analizo korporativnega komuniciranja med slovenskimi uporabniki družbenega omrežja Twitter. Izvedli smo jo s kombinacijo besedilnih podatkov, metapodatkov in korpusnih oznak, ki so na voljo v korpusu Janes-Tviti, pri analizi pa smo se osredotočili na tri vidike korporativnega komuniciranja v slovenskih uporabnikov: (1) njihovo prisotnost, aktivnost, dinamiko in količino objav, (2) rabo novomedijskih komunikacijskih elementov in (3) jezikovne izbire, opazovane na različnih ravneh jezikovnega opisa.
Izvedene analize so pokazale, da v primerjavi z zasebnimi računi v korporativnih tvitih izrazito prevladujejo standardne jezikovne prvine formalnega sporočanja, sicer redkejše neformalne in nestandardne izbire pa so uporabljene premišljeno glede na naslovnika sporočila in namen sporočanja. Analiza izkoriščanja novomedijskih elementov jasno kaže, da komuniciranje slovenskih korporativnih uporabnikov na družbenem omrežju Twitter ne sledi dialoškemu pristopu in da večina slovenskih podjetij in institucij Twitter razume kot dodatni kanal za enosmerno sporočanje klasičnih (skrajšanih) sporočil za javnost, sporočanjska vloga katerih ostaja pretežno informativna in pozitivno predstavitvena. Analiza ključnih besed razkrije pomembno razliko med negativnim poročanjskim slogom medijskih računov in med pozitivnim promocijskim slogom podjetij, javnih ustanov in nevladnih organizacij, kar nakazuje na potrebo po natančnejši kategorizaciji korporativnih računov v korpusu, ki jo načrtujemo za prihodnje raziskave.
Pričujoči prispevek je dragocen tudi zato, ker demonstrira potencial korpusnih pristopov v komunikologiji, medijskih študijah in drugih sorodnih družboslovnih disciplinah, ki temeljijo na jezikovnih podatkih, kar v slovenskem okolju še ni ustaljena praksa. Poleg teoretične relevantnosti imajo rezultati predstavljene analize tudi praktično vrednost za komunikološko stroko, saj izpostavljajo pomen ustrezno usposobljenih strokovnjakov za odnose z javnostmi, ki obvladajo dialoški, simetričen model družbenih omrežij, razumejo svojo posredniško vlogo med deležniki in podjetjem, ki ga zastopajo, ter proaktivno iščejo priložnosti za navezovanje pristnih stikov z deležniki in spodbujajo dialog z njimi.