Keywords and key emoji : Investigating a university’s Twitter posts before, during and after Covid-related restrictions

Many universities use social media to communicate and engage with stakeholders, including students and staff. In recent years, universities were also faced with navigating the challenges resulting from the Covid-19 global pandemic and related restrictive measures that disrupted routine operations. In this paper, we examine a case study of a UK University and its posts on Twitter (now X) prior to, during and following the period of restrictive measures. With a focus on features of the ‘Conversational Human Voice’ (Kelleher, 2009), we report keywords and key emoji in a corpus of Twitter posts between 2018 and 2022. We demonstrate that despite the disruption of the pandemic and restrictive measures, the University maintained a consistent strategy, capitalising on the timeliness and broadcast functions of the platform to celebrate activities of its personnel and promote local events. Furthermore, we demonstrate how emoji and other paralinguistic elements can be incorporated into a multimodal corpus analysis.