Social Media Marketing on Instagram. Exploration of Strategic Perspectives

Masters Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam, language: English, abstract: With 800 million users worldwide Instagram is one of the worlds leading social media platforms. The reason for the increasing relevance of Instagram is its mobile, local, social and visual character, which reflects how individuals are currently using social media and will continue to do so in the future. Instagrams combination of emotional visual content, story-telling and interaction with the community also makes it a platform that allows brands to differentiate themselves from others - to become unique in what are often very saturated markets. While Instagram is a new application and previous research focuses mainly on long established social media platforms such as Facebook, this thesis aims to explore the various strategic perspectives of successful social media marketing on Instagram by developing a theoretical frame work and presenting the practical strategies of three very different organisations in a multiple-case study design. The framework and the case studies prove that the five identified social media dimensions - content marketing, engagement marketing, influencer marketing, hashtags and Instagram advertising - are applied in practice but are adapted very individual on each organisation, its goals and its target group.