“You should get it, too!” : A multimodal analysis of promotional posts on Instagram
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | When looking to promote their products, companies increasingly turn to social medial influencers to embrace their brand and eagerly present it to their followers in several posts. These posts, identified by captions such as #ad and partnership tags, are labeled as ‘Product’ posts in this paper and analyzed on two levels to reveal their distinctive characteristics: 1.) ‘Product’ posts adopt stylistically significant features of traditional and web advertisements and thus belong to the genre colony of promotional genres; 2.) when isolated from other posts, ‘Product’ posts devoted to the promotion of the same product construct a continuous (albeit temporarily disrupted) narrative through cohesion, deixis, shared knowledge and context, etc. The paper adopts a multimodal approach as it concerns the posts’ textual and visual elements and their interrelationship. The data consists of posts uploaded by three Instagirls, i.e. female users of Instagram with a large following and thus a considerable impact. |
| Related projects: |