Özet:

Influencer marketing, one of the marketing methods used in social media, is the most preferred form of marketing today as it does not require much budget for brands. There is two sides here; brands and influencers. Brands want to engage with people who are accepted, trusted, and liked by the community and ask them to share about their products. In this way, brands can both promote their products and reach people outside their target audience more easily. On the other side of the issue, influencers are people who have managed to attract attention in a certain area on social media tools, have reached a certain number of followers, are liked, and trusted by their followers, and unlike celebrities, they promote products by creating word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) with the content they produce themselves. On social media, influencers use their real experiences, and expertise to recommend products because authentic, and storytelling content is more persuasive and helps them build a trusting social relationship with their followers. Research has shown that the simpler and more natural they appear in their posts, and the more they use plain and persuasive language, the more successful they are. However, it remains unclear which aspects of Instagram posts increase the influence of the influencer. The research was particularly based on this point. Content analysis was conducted based on the narratives used by influencers in their posts, and because of the research, specific suggestions were developed for building effective sentences. For instance, instead of making commissive sentences about the product, they should make sentences that show that they connect with the product and share their feelings. In this context, John Searle's theory of "speech acts" was used in the research. In his theory of speech acts, Searle classifies the illocutionary utterances used based on action into five groups. These are expressives, assertives, declarations, directives, and commissives. In the study, the posts of three award-winning micro influencers in the fashion and cosmetics industry were analyzed with the content analysis method and the usage patterns of prepositional phrases were determined. Accordingly, the most striking result is that influencers almost never used the speech act "commissives", i.e. they avoided statements that could put them under obligation while promoting products. This research article discussed the most used speech acts by influencers and the reflection of these speech acts on persuasion.

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