CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTIONS ON U.S. RETAILERS’ FACEBOOK PAGES: A PRAGMATIC-DISCURSIVE APPROACH

The growing popularity of social media has transformed corporate Facebook pages into key platforms for public customer–brand communication, organically blending promotional content with open service discourse. This study analyzes customer communicative interactions on the official Facebook pages of major U.S. retailers (Macy’s, Amazon, Walmart, and Costco) to develop a functional-pragmatic typology of English-language digital service discourse. Drawing on a pragmatic-discursive approach, a purposive sample of comment threads was examined with regard to customers’ communicative goals, emotional tone, and thematic relation to company posts. Two primary interaction types were identified: post-related interactions, which respond directly to promotional content (affective endorsement, purchase intent, product inquiries, and community sharing); and experience-related interactions, where customers focus on personal service experiences (complaints, disengagement, suggestions, service requests, and warnings). The findings demonstrate that users creatively repurpose corporate social media spaces into multifunctional arenas for endorsement, inquiry, feedback, and calls for accountability. The study concludes that English-language digital service discourse on Facebook is both strategic and performative, with users acting as recipients and co-authors of brand narratives. The proposed typology of customer–brand interactions may serve as a foundation for further research into linguistic and pragmatic variation in customer discourse and corporate responses, contributing to a deeper understanding of the evolution of digital customer relationships, the affordances of online platforms, and the complex dynamics of digital service communication.