Abstract:

An increase in the prevalence of social media usage both in Turkey and the rest of the world has led to a change in the way of using this area as an advertising channel. Having seen that the target groups increasingly are becoming more active in social media, marketers promote themselves to their target audience through social media platforms. Over time, social media platforms have begun to build their own advertisement applications to make marketers be more active and effective. Besides, social media also has initiated some celebrities who reach large masses through the content they share and create their own popular genre. In time, those celebrities have begun to present themselves and their accounts as advertising banners. The fact that social media celebrities use their social media accounts or themselves as advertisement tools as well as making advertisements through these channels has brought the concept of “influencer marketing” into the literature. The equivalent of this concept in Turkish literature is “influential marketing or “marketing prestige” however, in this study, it is conceptualized as “interactive marketing” and the agents of it as “e-sources. For the scope of the investigation into how e-sources use their account as an advertisement media and the process of advertising activities that they carry out with brands, the content analysis method was used in this study. For this purpose, four Instagram e-sources selected for purposeful sampling were analyzed for fifteen days. As a result, it is seen that e-sources use their Instagram pages and stories as an advertisement media and they directly include advertisement contents more during that period. 

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