"It wasn’t feedback it was a request": Exploring uses and discussions of the word feedback in digital business communication

Today, communication between businesses and their stakeholders is taking place online to a large extent. The steady increase in digital business discourse has entailed an increase in opportunities for consumers to provide feedback and voice their (dis)satisfaction publicly on social media. In this chapter, we aim to address this phenomenon by showing how corpus linguistic approaches may be used to study online feedback. We explore companies’ framing of customer messages as feedback on the social-networking platform Twitter (now X) by assessing the use of this term in corporate posts of British and Irish airlines and train operating companies. Our analysis studies how the term is used in corporate tweets, exploring the specific contexts in which it occurs and the words with which it frequently co-occurs (its collocates), to gain new insights into the discursive construction of feedback in online customer communication.