Read Between the Lines: The Role of Multimodality in Communicating Strategy on Social Media

This study explores the role multimodality plays in communicating strategy on social media, through a strategy-as-practice perspective. We conducted qualitative netnography research by sampling a focused dataset of 1,000 strategically focused posts from 50 strategists, out of all 968 FTSE 100 company strategists who have a presence on LinkedIn. Our results conceptualise three roles multimodality affords: distributing understanding with multimodal choices, persuading with multimodal evidence and resonating with multimodal semiotics. This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we extend the literature on strategic communication by showing how strategists integrate multimodal resources - textual, visual, video and interactive - to construct strategic meaning, perform identity work, and cultivate influence. Second, we advance the study of genres in strategy communication by identifying social media as a distinct genre of strategic communication that redistributes control of the narrative and enables new forms of relational engagement. Third, we expand the methodological repertoire of critical discourse analysis by demonstrating how digital and multimodal strategy communication on social media can be systematically collected and analysed at scale.