Social Media And Digital Influencers On Instagram: A Case Study

Abstract

With the emergence of social media and continuous progress and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in new media, communication professionals need to keep up to date with what consumers are talking about online. Brands tapped into this reality and understood that to influence interactions in this digital landscape, they would need to bring digital influencers into the equation about social media. By recognising that partnerships between beauty brands and digital influencers are a marketing strategy increasingly used by brands and by resorting to Instagram as a research environment, the project presented in this article aimed to understand, through a case study, the impacts that partnerships between the beauty brand Freshly Cosmetics and several digital influencers may have on its followers in Portugal. The study was conducted during the development of a master's dissertation in Applied Communication and, despite focusing on a single brand, enabled the authors to outline the methodology that will be further explored in future work with larger samples of brands. Ten publications from different digital influencers were selected and analysed according to a set of criteria, and a focus group was conducted with ten women who knew the brand under analysis. According to the results obtained, although digital influencers have some impact on decision-making, the participants preferred brands they already knew and their opinions were formed based on research and not on digital influencers' statements. For the participants, feedback from real consumers, external research conducted on their own, and the opinions of experts in the field are responsible for the brand's image in the eye of the consumer.