Otilia Pacea -
CorpTweet: Brands, Language and Identity in Web 2.0
(pag. 157-168)
Microblogging represents the largest trend in social media that recently emerged, spearheaded by its most popular service, Twitter. Neither companies nor organizations could have missed the opportunity to spawn their plenipotentiary voices and establish a safe social presence on the web, converging public and corporate interest into social brands. The microblogging phenomenon of Twitter has re-accommodated interpersonal interaction online, from self talk (diaristic posts), direct talk (replies), and indirect talk (talking to someone in front of everyone) to public talk. The currency is a body of words, the most difficult to control being the function or junk words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs) as markers of social engagement. This paper applies computerized corpus-based text analysis of style-related words in tweets from the most active social brands. My hypothesis is that universal patterns of social behaviour can be identified, which may further brand microblogging as a form of construction and co-construction of identity online.