Given the widespread occurrence of organizational communication during a crisis and the vital role of communicative messages in stakeholder engagement, it is essential to understand organizations' communicative messages and how organizations change their messages posted on social media to engage their stakeholders in a participatory process through retweets and likes. This understanding is needed, especially in a long-lasting crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. It is essential for organizations and their communication executives (spokespersons) who deal with social media. The present study examines organizational communication in the higher education industry during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This investigation pursues a nuanced understanding of how organizations engaged their stakeholders through the type of information communicated and the language used in messages over four months (January 11 – May 10, 2020), divided into "emerging-crisis" and "during-pandemic" periods. The empirical analysis focuses on a data set of more than 35,000 tweets posted by 50 universities over four months. It employed computer-aided text analysis (CATA) with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software and K-means cluster analysis to reveal content themes and language styles and understand how these changed in communications to university stakeholders via social media.