Communication strategies of small businesses on social media: A comparison of Belgium and Canada

Details

Supervisors

Dupont, Maïté

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue, à finalité spécialisée: langues des affaires

Abstract

enThe purpose of the present study is to analyze the communication strategies used by Belgian and Canadian small businesses on social media. It is based on a corpus of 72 posts from the Instagram and Facebook accounts of six enterprises. This study looks at various linguistic and discursive features, such as second-person form, tone, imperatives, hooks, questions, language choice, and communicative purposes. The results show some differences between the two samples: the Belgian one relies more often on vous, imperatives, and promotional communication, whereas the Canadian businesses studied display diverse relational and personal practices. The engagement rate analysis shows that posts with a more human tone tend to be associated with higher levels of engagement, while posts with commercial purpose generally appear to present lower observable engagement. Still, the results emphasize that the effectiveness of a strategy does not rely on a single, isolated linguistic feature but really depends on the interaction between language, communicative purpose, platform, brand identity, and the relationship with the audience.