Social Networks: The New Medium of Advertising – Instagram Case

Introduction

It is possible to define advertising as a communication tool that informs individuals forming the target audience of a brand and product and persuades them to purchase those products and services of this brand. The main purpose of the advertising is to stimulate the target audience for a product or service via messages and to ensure that this product and service is purchased (Kocabaş & Elden, 1997, p. 9). The presence of a fierce competition environment of our today’s world has created the necessity of creating more effective marketing areas for brands' products and services (Gürel & Alem, 2014, p. 5). Brands need new advertising channels and new strategies to make a difference in the message bombardment of numerous products and services and to reach the target audience. Companies that use the advertising strategies intensively to bring their brands and products together with the target audience have focused on social networks in this sense.

The fact that the concept of social media becomes a part of our daily lives by means of developing technologies, widespread use of social networks, and enabling the use of social networks by technological communication tools at any time by eliminating space and time barriers have made these platforms a functional space for advertising. Based on the idea that digital technologies are reshaping relationship and personal experiences with all dimensions in this sense and transforming current lives (McLuhan, 2005, p. 8), it is possible to say that advertising strategies are affected by this change and social networks are used as new platforms for brands and products in terms of marketing. Today, almost all brands take part in social networks through accounts of their brands and products and implement their digital advertising strategies by using different social networks in order to strengthen their brand and corporate image and to increase the reputation of their brand and corporate. In order to reach the target audience that is outside the range of their social media accounts, companies use the people identified as social media phenomenon for their companies’ promotion and advertising works by cooperating with them and benefiting from the target audience of these people who have a certain number of followers in social media and are called as social media celebrity.

This study focuses on Instagram, where advertising and marketing strategies are used extensively and the collaborations of companies with social media phenomenon. In this context, the data obtained from interviews with 50 social media phenomenon were analyzed and the relationship between advertising and phenomenon in social media was evaluated.