برندسازی سلف در رسانه ی اجتماعی: آنالیز سبک وبلاگ نویسان در اینستاگرام Self-Branding on Social Media: An Analysis of Style Bloggers on Instagram

1. Introduction There is an increasing trend on social media platforms of users trying to market themselves as brands to gain attention and cultural and monetary value, especially among the subculture of personal style bloggers. These bloggers ذare primarily young women who post pictures of their outfits and their possessions and comment on fashion-related issues and products [1]. Due to their large numbers of followers, some well-known style bloggers are influential and attain fame in both online and offline worlds. They enjoy such popularity because social media platforms have established a public persona [2], where the individual choice, autonomy, empowerment, and independence of women are emphasized. Evidence shows that style bloggers who use social media as a platform to establish their self-brands enjoy high levels of creativity and self-expression; they do not have to follow the conventional fashion mold—i.e., thin, tall, white, and rich [3]. This seemingly upends the traditional fashion realm, which includes fashion magazines and runways shows. Nevertheless, the obsession with investing time and finances into new technology with revolutionary potential, such as social media, obscures the fact that style bloggers who promote themselves online are still firmly contextualized in a neoliberal capitalist framework and reinforce the existing hierarchies of class, gender, aesthetics, and tastes [1]. This study seeks to address this controversy by investigating style bloggers’ self-branding practices on Instagram. Specifically, we address the following questions: (1) How do people establish their branded-selves on a social media platform? (2) What are the distinct technological features of social media as a tool for self-branding? To answer these questions, we examined style bloggers on an image-based social media platform, Instagram. Instagram is a rapidly growing visual self-branding tool; it has become the most popular and largest photo-sharing social media platform in the world, with 600 million monthly active users [4]. Furthermore, Instagram users have the highest scores for showing affection for and following fashion trends compared with three other mainstream social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat) [5]. Given that the Internet is increasingly turning into a visual medium and more and more individuals are using images to express themselves, we believe that Instagram is an appropriate platform for examining individual users’ self-branding practices. This study contributes to both the academic and practical fields. For academia, this study extends the use and gratification theory [6-10] by explaining how women use social media to satisfy their need for information, personal identity, integration and social interaction, and entertainment [11]. Regarding the practical significance of this research, the findings of this study can help marketers understand audiences’ preferences for and interests in fashion and style-related products.