Twitter has an estimated 280 million active users that send nearly 10,000 tweets every second. Taking advantage of this platform, companies and corporations have begun tweeting their customers in order to build a relationship with them. In the process they are utilizing what the Harvard Business School calls “corporate empathy,” a management technique that simulates empathy between a corporation and their consumers (Parmar, 2015).
In this analytical study, I have collected and analyzed tweets from a sampling of the most and least empathetic businesses listed in the Harvard study. I have analyzed the correspondence between these companies and their consumers in an attempt to determine why and how these businesses are communicating empathy on a non-expressive, text-based, and limited media. Common factors that affect users’ perception of the company’s empathy include their ability to respond in a timely manner, the voice the tweet is written in, and whether or not the person on the other end of that account makes themselves available to the consumer.
I also categorized the other types of tweets these corporate accounts make in order to understand what other non-correspondence related factors affect public perception of empathy. The least empathetic companies tended to tweet about themselves while the most empathetic focused mainly on tweets to inform and help their followers.
It is my hope that the information gained from this study will help aid in learning to write empathetically and teach companies how to better respond to their consumers’ needs.