What to Say and How to Say It? Corporate Strategic Communication through Social Media during the Pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Studying the COVID-19 pandemic differs from past studies on emergency management because this crisis event, compared with the terrorist attack or natural disasters, unfolds in a longer period and with a wider spread of geographic regions. This study explores what and how the information was communicated in the corporate strategic communication through social media across three phases of the global public health crisis, including the early phase, shelter-in-place phase, and reopening phase. The content analysis on corporate Twitter accounts of selected publicly listed firms in the US suggests that corporate social media communication is functional, information-based, direct, and of lower richness during the earlier phase of the pandemic. As the pandemic evolves, corporate tweets, though still functional, are altered to improve customer engagement via the addition of videos and embedded links. For low media richness data formats, the replies/retweet ratio is less than 20%, while high media richness data formats produce the replies/retweet ratio of more than 50%. Implications for future research and practices are offered.