Studying Organizations on Instagram

With the rise of social media platforms based on the sharing of pictures and videos, the question of how such platforms should be studied arises. Previous research on social media (content) has mainly focused on text (written words) and the rather text-based social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Drawing on research in the fields of visual, political, and business communication, we introduce a methodological framework to study the fast-growing image-sharing service Instagram. This methodological framework was developed to study political parties’ Instagram accounts and tested by means of a study of Swedish political parties during the 2014 election campaign. In this article, we adapt the framework to also study other types of organizations active on Instagram by focusing on the following main questions: Do organizations only use Instagram to share one-way information, focusing on disseminating information and self-presentation? Or is Instagram used for two-way communication to establish and cultivate organization-public relationships? We introduce and discuss the coding of variables with respect to four clusters: the perception of the posting, image management, integration, and interactivity.

[1]  Hans-Jürgen Bucher,et al.  The relevance of attention for selecting news content. An eye-tracking study on attention patterns in the reception of print and online media , 2006 .

[2]  D. Schill,et al.  The Visual Image and the Political Image: A Review of Visual Communication Research in the Field of Political Communication , 2012 .

[3]  Inés López-López,et al.  When Sharing Consumption Emotions With Strangers Is More Satisfying Than Sharing Them With Friends , 2014 .

[4]  Shahira S Fahmy,et al.  Visual communication theory and research : a mass communication perspective , 2014 .

[5]  Z. Bauman.  The Individualized Society , 2001 .

[6]  D. Lilleker,et al.  Microblogging, Constituency Service and Impression Management: UK MPs and the Use of Twitter , 2011, The Impact of Legislatures.

[7]  J. Svensson.  Negotiating the Political Self on Social Media Platforms : An In-Depth Study of Image-Management in an Election-Campaign in a Multi-Party Democracy , 2012 .

[8]  Maurice Vergeer,et al.  Is the voter only a tweet away? Micro blogging during the 2009 European Parliament election campaign in the Netherlands , 2011, First Monday.

[9]  Edward F. McQuarrie,et al.  It's not Your Magazine AD: Magnitude and Direction of Recent Changes in Advertising Style , 2008 .

[10]  Girish J. Gulati,et al.  Gulati elections of 2006 and 2008 Social networks in political campaigns : Facebook and the congressional , 2013 .

[11]  C. Fill.  Simply Marketing Communications , 2005 .

[12]  G. Boehm.  Was ist ein Bild , 1994 .

[13]  J. Macnamara,et al.  Social Media Communication in Organizations: The Challenges of Balancing Openness, Strategy, and Management , 2012 .

[14]  Eunji Lee,et al.  Pictures Speak Louder than Words: Motivations for Using Instagram , 2015, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[15]  Rafael Lapiedra Alcamí,et al.  Social networks and Web 3.0: their impact on the management and marketing of organizations , 2012 .

[16]  Arvid Kappas,et al.  Perceiving press photography: a new integrative model, combining iconology with psychophysiological and eye-tracking methods , 2012 .

[17]  Richard D. Waters,et al.  Engaging stakeholders through social networking: How nonprofit organizations are using Facebook , 2009 .

[18]  Jimmy Sanderson,et al.  I'm Going to Instagram It! An Analysis of Athlete Self-Presentation on Instagram , 2015 .

[19]  U. Russmann.  Online Political Discourse on Facebook: An Analysis of Political Campaign Communication in Austria , 2012 .

[20]  A. Lenhart.  Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015 , 2015 .

[21]  H. Klingemann,et al.  The Oxford handbook of political behavior , 2007 .

[22]  J. Blair,et al.  The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments , 2012 .

[23]  Chris Fill.  Marketing communications : engagements, strategies and practice , 2006 .

[24]  Zizi Papacharissi.  A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age , 2010 .

[25]  J. Svensson,et al.  Picturing the Party: Instagram and Party Campaigning in the 2014 Swedish Elections , 2016 .

[26]  Ruthann Weaver Lariscy,et al.  Candidates Make Good Friends: An Analysis of Candidates' Uses of Facebook , 2008 .

[27]  I. McAllister.  The Personalization of Politics , 2007 .

[28]  R. Kies,et al.  Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation , 2010 .

[29]  Kevin G. Barnhurst,et al.  Mapping Visual Studies in Communication , 2004 .

[30]  Marion G. Müller.  What is Visual Communication? Past and Future of an Emerging Field of Communication Research , 2007 .

[31]  M. Broersma,et al.  BETWEEN BROADCASTING POLITICAL MESSAGES AND INTERACTING WITH VOTERS , 2012 .

[32]  Neil Postman,et al.  Teaching as a conserving activity , 1969 .

[33]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  Engaging Stakeholders Through Twitter: How Nonprofit Organizations Are Getting More Out of 140 Characters or Less , 2010, ArXiv.

[34]  A. Chadwick.  The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power , 2013 .

[35]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[36]  Maurice Vergeer,et al.  Personalization in e-campaigning: A cross-national comparison of personalization strategies used on candidate websites of 17 countries in EP elections 2009 , 2013, New Media Soc..

[37]  James Stanyer,et al.  ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES, ONLINE SELF-PRESENTATION AND THE PERSONAL VOTE:Party, personality and webstyles in the United States and United Kingdom , 2008 .

[38]  Alan Trachtenberg,et al.  Rhetoric of the Image , 2008 .

[39]  Ollie Ganz,et al.  The cigar ambassador: how Snoop Dogg uses Instagram to promote tobacco use , 2013, Tobacco Control.

[40]  G. Enli,et al.  INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE , 2013 .

[41]  J. Golbeck,et al.  Twitter use by the U.S. Congress , 2010 .

[42]  C. Brantner,et al.  Effects of Visual Framing on Emotional Responses and Evaluations of News Stories about the Gaza Conflict 2009 , 2011 .

[43]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media , 2011, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[44]  Johannes A.G.M..  Models of Democracy and Concepts of Communication. , 2000 .

[45]  Manuel Au-Yong-Oliveira,et al.  What If Colorful Images Become More Important than Words? Visual Representations as the Basic Building Blocks of Human Communication and Dynamic Storytelling , 2014 .

[46]  Philip Barker,et al.  Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From Production to Produsage , 2009 .

[47]  Cristian Vaccari,et al.  From echo chamber to persuasive device? Rethinking the role of the Internet in campaigns , 2013, New Media Soc..

[48]  J. Svensson.  Nina on the Net: A study of a politician campaigning on social networking sites , 2011 .