This present study investigated online advertisements on Instagram’s posts of a social media influencer. It examined how a social media influencer uses semiotic modes as a form of self-presentation and sent a persuasive message as an advertising campaign on Instagram posts. The research data was Instagram posts that comprised captions (texts) and images of one social media influencer, namely “Jovi Adiguna.” The research generally addressed a main research question of “How does Jovi use semiotic modes as a form of self-presentation and send persuasive messages as advertising campaigns on Instagram posts?” This research question covers the following unit of analysis: a) What are the textual and visual features of the Instagram posts? b) How are these features used to display self-presentation as a social influencer and create a persuasive message as an advertising campaign?
This research looked at the English captions that blend with other languages and other modalities. Therefore, qualitative approach was adopted as the methodology to investigate the semiotic modes and linguistic features in the captions. Moreover, lexico-grammatical and visual grammar were used as the analysis procedures to analyze both text and images. The sample of the data was derived from 21 Instagram advertisements, posted by an Indonesian social media influencer. All the data gathered were examined into four main stages of analysis. Firstly, lexico-grammatical analysis (Labrador et al., 2014) was used to reveal positive evaluation and informal style as linguistic features. Secondly, the visual grammar analysis (Kress and Leeuwen, 2006) was applied to examine the semiotic modes. Thirdly, the interconnectedness between texts and images were examined to reveal the construction of persuasive message through multimodality. Fourthly, the data was also analyzed for the self-presentation of the social media influencer as projected through captions and other modalities.
The findings revealed that the Instagram advertisements suggested a vast amount of colloquial and informal language, which was deliberate in establishing familiarity with the audience to minimize the communication distance between the influencer and his followers. The image analysis also presented that the influencer had roles to display himself in the image to shape credibility and trust as credible reviewers. Furthermore, this study implied two different capabilities as the center of present self-presentation in one social media strand. First, his self-presentation inferred to the sexualized portrayals as a cross-dressing influencer. Second, based on the act performance, he displayed himself for the impression management and the tactics or strategies used in online advertising. Finally, this research had theoretical and pedagogical implications in that it provided insights into: (i) offering informative details on specific linguistics features and visual communication modes on Instagram to persuade individuals (followers) to be attracted to certain products, specifically in the context of online advertisement on Instagram; (ii) providing language teachers in teaching language(s) and communicative competence in today’s digital era to be effective and resourceful communicators. |