Wine promotion on Facebook: a linguistic comparison of posts by producers from English-speaking countries

Facebook can be considered one of the main social marketing tools used by companies who decide to advertise their products online and who aim to keep in touch with customers quickly and effectively. Social media in general and Facebook in particular are characterised by a high level of interactivity, and visual, textual and linguistic features are strategically used to attract and involve potential customers and to get their feedback, thus enhancing the company’s visibility on the market as well as the company’s knowledge of the market. This paper analyses the language used to advertise wine and wine events through Facebook posts by producers from New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Method-wise, this study applies the same analytical methods used by Manca (2021) in her analysis of the interactive and interactional strategies employed by Australian and US wine companies to advertise their products and activities on Facebook, and also some of the analytical methods used by Bianchi (2017a, 2017b) in her studies on Facebook posts written by travel agencies to advertise their destinations. Besides describing the metadiscursive features which are mostly used on Facebook by wineries (Hyland 2005), this paper aims to establish whether the forms of interaction and the positioning of the writers depend on cultural factors, on the medium used or on other variables.