Creating Engagement on Instagram. Google's Made with Code Campaign

Abstract

The role of social media is constantly growing, which means that brands must follow their audiences and learn to communicate campaigns in new contexts. The characteristics of social media offer these campaigns new opportunities to bind their audience to the goal and values of the campaign. Evoking engagement on social media is a way build a positive relationship. To gain that, however, communicators need to understand what drives engagement on social media. By combining theories on social media interaction and Aristotle's theory of rhetoric a framework for the analysis is built. Combining these theories proves that ethos (a positive feeling about the communicator), pathos (evoking emotions in the recipient) and logos (proving the message with facts) will evoke engagement on social media postings.

The goal for this research is to examine if Google evokes engagement through its campaign’s Made with Code's Instagram captions. The hypothesis is that Google uses a lot of rhetoric means to evoke engagement. This study also aims to testify whether the rhetorical means really evoke engagement on @madewithcode's Instagram postings.

Google’s posts on the @madewithcode Instagram channel are studied on the basis of Aristotle’s rhetoric means of persuasion. The analysis shows that in almost half of the postings (43 percent) no rhetoric mean at all is used. 27 percent of the posts use pathos, 17 percent ethos. Yet, those postings with rhetorical means evoke higher engagement, which proves the theory of the relationship between rhetoric and engagement right. Therefore a new theory is built in this study, stating that the use of rhetorical means evokes engagement on social media postings.