Digital media and business communication

This chapter discusses the use of digital media in the context of business communication and shows how corpus linguistic methods can be used to gain new insights into these media. It focuses on the latter and mainly discusses interactions between companies and the outside world, which may take place via a variety of digital media, including social media platforms such as Facebook, online review platforms such as TripAdvisor, or corporate websites and blogs. The case study in this chapter examines the use of the microblogging platform Twitter to communicate with customers. It is based on the Airlines Twitter Corpus which includes tweets passengers addressed to 10 British and 3 Irish airlines over a period of 4 months in 2016 and 2017 as well as the airlines' replies. In the keyword analysis, the customers' tweets were used as the target corpus and compared against the reference corpus comprising the airlines' tweets.