A comparative study of U.S. and Chinese companies’ use of multimodal interactional metadiscourse on Twitter

Wenjuan Xu and Xingsong Shi
Yunnan Normal University | University of International Business and Economics

This study conducts a comparative analysis on the use of multimodal interactional metadiscourse by U.S. and Chinese companies on Twitter. Six hundred tweets generated by twelve U.S. and Chinese online retailing, technology, energy, and automobile companies were analyzed. The results indicate that corporate tweets are highly interpersonal in nature, rich in interactional metadiscourse. Attitude markers, self-mentions, and a series of engagement markers are particularly prominent. Various non-textual devices, such as pictures, videos, @-mentions, hashtags (#), and hyperlinks, are co-deployed with textual elements to construct interpersonal meanings. Overall U.S. companies used more engagement markers, while Chinese companies employed more stance markers, with other salient differences observed in different subcategories. These variances can be attributed to various sociocultural and contextual factors. The study contributes to the still scarce research on multimodal metadiscourse in online business discourse and uncovers the influence of sociocultural and contextual factors on the use of interpersonal resources in digital business genres.

Publication history

Date received: 10 November 2024

Date accepted: 10 October 2025

Published online: 29 June 2026

Table of contents

The increasing popularity of social networking sites has significantly transformed the ways through which companies communicate with stakeholders. Many companies have established official accounts on popular social media, such as Twitter (now renamed as X) and Facebook, to name a few. These social media platforms become an important component of firms’ daily communication efforts and help to fulfil a wide range of essential corporate communication functions, including enhancing corporate image, promoting products and services, and developing stakeholder relationships (Pardo et al. 2022).

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