Background: Social media has become a big part of our society. One platform that has had remarkable growth in popularity is Instagram. In Sweden, Instagram had 5.75 million users in 2021. The evolution of Instagram created an opportunity for people to establish new careers as social media influencers (SMIs). Today, SMIs are professional content marketers who monetize their large following making them dependent on being able to influence their followers.  Purpose: This paper aims to explore how SMIs can influence their followers on Instagram. A macro and micro perspective will be combined to create a broad and holistic understanding of the phenomenon. The study leverages on two theories; institutional theory and relationship marketing. Furthermore, the empirical context of this study is the SMI Bianca Ingrosso. Together, the theories and empirical data will address the research question.  Method: This is qualitative research that includes a netnography and 12 semi-structured interviews. The findings are analyzed with a thematic analysis approach.  Conclusion: Based on the frame of reference and empirical findings, a conceptual framework has been developed that gives a clear overview of the research subject. The authors have identified that SMIs can influence followers by acting according to Instagram’s logic, and they can exploit their legitimacy to increase their influence. Furthermore, SMIs make sure to maintain and build on their relationship with their followers by engaging in relationship marketing.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study explored the perspectives of six public sector human resource professionals on social media policies and how it maintains the behavior of employees that engage on social media. The expansion of technology in the public sector allows personnel to build relationships with the people they serve and participate in public forums. As more legislators and professionals use social media for work and personal matters, they are more likely to face public humiliation and disciplinary punishment over uncivil behavior. This research shows the public sector institutions in the Indianapolis area have lenient social media policies. In addition, this research argues that work policies, i.e., social media, should be modernized and relevant for all cultures. This dissertation analyzes how social media policies are established and executed within local government organizations using a multi-method approach. The first phase of this study surveyed and interviewed human resources professionals. While social media issues are still relatively new, progressive disciplinary procedures are most likely to be implemented when an employee engages in uncivil behavior on social media. The Logic of Appropriateness as the framework for the content analysis of social media policies from eight local agencies explores how the organizations direct employee behavior. The analysis findings determine certain public sector institutions in the Indianapolis area have social media policies for legal protection but place ethical value on respect as an expectation for employee conduct. This study backs the development of transparent social media policies in public sector agencies, especially since there is a recurring shift in the generational and cultural background of public representatives.

Diploma thesis "The marketing usage in the social media" deals with the application of the social media in the marketing communication. My target is to create a comprehensive outlook on social media in marketing promotion. What are the most commonly used tools of social media marketing? Which forms of promotion does it offer? How to use these tools correctly? Is the promotion that uses social media effective? How big is its role in the current communication and how do the clients understand the social media marketing? The thesis is divided into two parts. The theoretical one describes the basic definitions of terms for my thesis. Later in the thesis, I am explaining the position of marketing in media and what new elements it has brought. I do this throurgh mapping of the online and social media marketing and promotion resources. Another section of the theoretical part is devoted description of selected social media. As an own contribution to my practical part of diploma thesis, I conducted my own research. It was done in a form of qualitative research, more complex open-ended questions, focused on a smaller group of respondents intended to detect the advantages and disadvantages of the use of social media in current marketing. The conslusion of my thesis deals with the results of my research. Here...

Die Arbeit untersucht insgesamt 25 kostenfreie Social Media Analytics-Werkzeuge und liefert einen Beitrag zu einer systematischen Beurteilung dieser Anwendungssystemklasse im Rahmen des Social Customer Relationship Managements.:1 Einleitung 1.1 Motivation 1.2 Problemstellung 1.3 Vorgehen 2 Grundlagen 2.1 Social Media 2.2 Social CRM 2.3 Social Media-Analys 2.4 Softwareanalyse 2.5 Prototyping 3 Analyse von Social Media-Analyse-Tools 3.1 Kurzvorstellung der einzelnen Tools 3.2 Kernfunktionalitäten kostenfreier SMA-Anwendungen 3.3 Realisierbare Anwendungsfälle im SCRM 3.4 Vergleich mit Funktionalitäten einer kostenpflichtigen SMA-Anwendung 3.5 Betrachtung von Unterschieden 4 Entwicklung einer Auswahlhilfe 4.1 Vorüberlegungen 4.2 Implementierung 4.3 Beschreibung 5 Erkenntnisse 5.1 Ergebnisse 5.2 Defizite 6 Ausblick

Social media have transformed business commerce and consumer communication, yet organizational leaders lack clear strategies for using social media platforms to their advantage. The purpose of this qualitative multicase study was to explore social media marketing strategies for increasing sales. The relationship marketing conceptual framework grounded this study. Data collection included semistructured interviews with 5 organizational leaders from 5 different organizations in the San Francisco, California, Bay Area and a review of participants’ documents including marketing materials, social media posts, and published sales reports. Data analysis included coding, categorization, and identification of major themes. The thematic assessment approach revealed 5 major themes from participants’ responses that aligned with findings from the literature review. Themes included identifying the target audience, developing a customer roadmap to convert prospects to consumers, managing customer relationships to increase brand loyalty, and developing key performance indicators to measure the success of social media campaigns. Study findings may increase local organizational leaders’ knowledge of social media strategies that they can use to increase brand awareness, brand loyalty, and sales for their organizations. Implications for social change include the opportunity for local leaders to increase sales, which could lead to more jobs and improved economies in local communities.

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Since its inception in the early 2000s, social media has quickly become a meaningful source of online community for people across the globe. The use of promotional advertising on social media has brought both helpful and potentially harmful exposure to a wide variety of information. This dissertation aims to uncover certain underlying physiological mechanisms, specifically, neural mechanisms, that drive donation behavior in online contexts involving a mediated form of communication. Understanding donation behavior online is vital to make more effective campaigns that reach mass audiences to solve world problems. Focusing on donation behavior as a primary online prosocial action, this dissertation explores the following research question and associated hypotheses, “How do our physiological processes influence donation decision making in varying online contexts, and what types of information influence those decisions?” Although much is known about factors that influence donation behavior, less is known about what physiological processes are correlated with prosocial behaviors, especially in online situations. This approach is taken in an effort to connect psychophysiology with a common, ecologically-valid modern media experience to help understand why people decide to act on social media posts or keep scrolling. Chapter one reviews psychophysiological responses to media and their traditional place in the literature, connecting the seemingly dissimilar fields of psychophysiology and communication. A secondary goal of this review is to establish the importance of measuring physiological responses in communication studies. Next, the history of research on prosocial behavior is discussed, including the operationalization of prosocial behavior to create context for the main study that connects physiological responses to online donation behavior. The second half of the dissertation describes a pilot study (N=155) focusing on social media post characteristics that contribute to online donation behavior. In the 3 x 2 x 2 pilot study, image emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral), popularity (low or high number of likes), and source intentions (label of an advertisement) were manipulated to examine their relationship to online donation behavior. In the main study, a revised design based on the pilot results is presented with the addition of neural fMRI data collection. The ultimate goals of this dissertation are to (1) investigate the physiological correlates of online donation behavior (through emotional appeals and other features of social media posts) and (2) contribute to the literature connecting the communication and neuroscience disciplines. The pilot study revealed that negative emotional appeals influenced people to donate more to causes than neutral and positively-valenced images. Additionally, other features influenced whether people acted on posts, such as the number of likes or a label as an advertisement (source intention). The dissertation involves combining this design with an fMRI study to investigate the neural responses to this facet of decision making online. The results of the studies described in this dissertation are the following: across multiple studies, participants donated the most money to negatively-valenced posts compared to neutral or positively-valenced posts. Other factors, such as the number of likes on a post, or whether the post was labeled as sponsored or unsponsored, presented mixed results (in terms of statistical significance and visual patterns). Additionally, the neural patterns seen when people were viewing negative, positive, and neutral posts, varied by region, with the high emotional posts (positive and negative) showing different activation patterns compared to the neutral posts. Neural patterns mirrored behavioral changes to provide additional support for the observed behavior. Applying a physiological lens to online behavior remains an area that is underserved in the literature, and this is a gap this dissertation seeks to fill. Combining neural data with behavioral findings is performed to reveal that people may be physiologically regulating their responses to the campaigns, and in turn, may take action based on their physical reactions. Ideally, the results will be applied to policy-making and lead to cause marketing efforts to help solve world problems with more effective messaging to the public. / Media & Communication

Socialt medieanvändande är en vana för många människor. Åtskilliga studier har konstaterat att socialt medieanvändande både kan öka och minska känslan av gemenskap.  Känsla av sammanhang (KASAM) är ett centralt begrepp i det salutogena perspektivet och en skyddsfaktor mot ohälsa. Studien undersökte relationen mellan KASAM och socialt medieanvändande med ett urval om 129 personer. För att besvara frågeställningarna konstruerades en enkät bestående av fyra skalor nämligen KASAM, Attention Control Scale, Social Media Fatigue Scale och Hälsosamma Internetbeteenden. Analysmetoderna var korrelationsanalyser och regressionsanalyser. Analyserna visade att KASAM har betydelse för uppmärksamhet och social medietrötthet. Kön, ålder och KASAM har betydelse för hälsosamma internetbeteenden. KASAM har ett positivt samband med uppmärksamhet och hälsosamma internetbeteenden och ett negativt samband med social medietrötthet. Samband noterades mellan social medietrötthet och uppmärksamhet. Slutsatsen var att en stark KASAM skyddar mot ohälsa vid socialt medieanvändande. Den egenkonstruerade skalan Hälsosamma Internetbeteenden genererade signifikanta, men inte reliabla resultat.

This study has evaluated how Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre (TFNC), a government institution overseeing nutrition, uses social media to enhance the nutrition literacy of caregivers and parents of children under the age of five years. The study contributes to knowledge on how Tanzania’s resource-constrained health sector’s nutrition communication can benefit from social media by answering the following research questions: Which social media platforms and features does TFNC use to share nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years? What kinds of nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years does TFNC share on social media? How is nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years posted on TFNC social media pages packaged? And, how frequently is nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years repeated on TFNC social media pages? These questions have been answered from a social-behavioral change communication perspective that has combined the Media Ecology Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior. This quantitative study has gathered data on TFNC’s social media activities (posts containing nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years) between May 2020 to April 2023. The posts were manually extracted from the center’s pages into Microsoft Excel for coding before exportation to SPSS version 20 for analysis. The study has found that TFNC actively uses Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to share nutrition knowledge on its pages and video format is the most used. The shared educative nutrition knowledge during the observed period, the use of social media features in sharing the knowledge, and the frequency of repeating nutrition messages are limited. Overall, the center’s nutrition social media-based knowledge-sharing needs improving to optimally contribute to nutrition literacy pertaining to children under the age of five years.