Studying webcare across industries: from customer care to relationship management

Businesses regularly engage in digital business communication by addressing stakeholders and responding to their feedback online. While previous research has explored these interactions from diverse perspectives, industry-specific differences have not been studied extensively to date. This article addresses this gap in research by studying the digital interactions of US companies from three different industries (airlines, food and beverage, streaming services) to uncover their approach to communicating with stakeholders online, also known as webcare. The study is based on the US Corporate Twitter Corpus, which includes 4.4m English tweets posted by and addressed to US companies, such as American Airlines, Burger King and HBO, between September 2021 and February 2023. By carrying out a keyword analysis, it investigates differences in the digital communication of the industries studied and links them to the organizational goals of webcare, including customer care, marketing, and reputation and relationship management. The findings of the corpus linguistic analysis show that the three industries engage in webcare to different ends. While airlines have a clear focus on customer care, streaming services and food and beverage use webcare primarily for marketing and relationship management purposes, highlighting the role of user engagement in online interactions. These findings underline the importance of taking the industry into account when engaging in webcare research and interpreting its results, which may not be generalizable across industries. At the same time, they give insight into industry-specific practice by revealing differences in the organizational strategy and goal pursued when interacting with stakeholders online.