Metaphors and emotions in corporate Twitter. A case study of Acciona e Iberdrola

Abstract

Over the last few years, research on emotions in Twitter has considerably increased, especially in areas like Marketing and Human Resources, but there are no studies to date that investigate the figurative expression of emotions in digital business communication. This article is an attempt to analyse the metaphors that describe or evoke emotions in the corporate Twitter of Acciona and Iberdrola, two Ibex 35 companies that stand out for their use of social media (Epsilon Technologies, 2016). To do so, we collected a corpus of 798 tweets, published during the second trimester of 2016. We first identified the emotions with more recurrence and the lexical systems that describe these emotions; second, we classified a corpus of metaphors in terms of discourse field ‘emotions’ and analysed them according to cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 and Kövecses, 2005). Findings allow us to draw the following conclusions: 1) the importance of emotions in corporate digital communication, 2) the relevance of metaphors in the expression of emotions, 3) the influence of mission, vision and values in the conceptual map of metaphors built with reference to emotions.