Language is a fundamental tool companies use to achieve a number of key business objectives, such as persuading customers to purchase their products, winning the trust of investors and engaging with stakeholders on social media. While this is a widely-acknowledged fact, cross-disciplinary research combining insights from business studies and linguistics is still scarce. In this talk, I will present two studies in which I use the tools of linguistics to systematically analyze and assess the effects of business communications in two different domains. The first study focuses on corporate social responsibility reports and investigates how companies use language persuasively in these texts to win the trust of stakeholders. The second study seeks to understand what communication style works best for responding to customer complaints on Twitter. By presenting these studies I am to show that theories and methods of linguistics can help us gain fresh insights into the features and effects of business communication.