Lead & Tweet: What leaders say when constructing identity on Twitter

The article analyses and discusses leaders’ identity constructions on Twitter (now X). Based on a corpus of 766 tweets from highly positioned Danish leaders, nominated as ‘leaders of the year’ between 2018-2022, the article investigates how the affordances of the platform may both enable and constrain professional identity construction and corporate branding. Adopting the approach of social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS) (Khosravinik, 2017; Khosravinik & Unger, 2016), the article conducts an in-depth analysis of three leaders’ constructions, revealing three overarching strategies in performing their identities: They recontextualise discourses that reflect societal and political concerns and tap into the business areas leaders represent; they use these discourses strategically to create an identity; and finally, they optimize their identity construction to abide by the affordances of the platform. Thus, in their tweets, the leaders try to achieve followership by drawing on dominant discourses and constructing their personalities to appeal to users’ emotions and opinions. These findings suggest that performing identity and creating followership on Twitter is a sophisticated discursive process that will have to consider multiple discursive, linguistic and social media requirements to be effective.