SALES ARE THE NEW LIKES: THE EMERGENCE OF INSTAGRAM AS A NEW MEDIA BUSINESS MODEL

Faculty of Humanities

SALES ARE THE NEW LIKES: THE EMERGENCE OF

INSTAGRAM AS A NEW MEDIA BUSINESS MODEL

Renate Brulleman

Student number: 10817069

Master Thesis

Master of Arts (MA) in New Media and Digital Culture

Supervisor: Tim Highfield

Second reader: Niels van Doorn

June 29, 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 2

1. Advertising in the digital age 5

2. Platform affordances 16

3. Case studies 28

3.1 Adidas NEO 29

3.2 HiSmile 33

3.3 Kate Spade New York 36

4. Discussion 42

5. Conclusions 46

INTRODUCTION

Ever more, commerce and profits rely on how well a business is able to manage and augment its digital infrastructure and leverage the value-creating actions of its users. Due to the wide use of social media today, social platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become an effective way for brands to reach specific audiences and segments of users that connect on particular channels. New ways have emerged to transform marketing into an increasingly personalized solution to reach higher engagement. Aside from the use of social media for purposes such as community building, communication and entertainment, the design of platforms lends itself better and better to support commerce and online advertising. As the technological specificities of platforms evolve, the ways we access, produce and participate on the web changes considerably. The rise of smartphones or other digital devices strongly contributed to these developments (Tuten and Solomon), as the creation and circulation of audio, photo, and video content as well as increased interconnectivity were hereby enabled.

In this era of transformation, the platform emerged as a dominant technology to create new value. To modern businesses and organizations digital platforms have become inseparable from their market strategy, and customer interaction now largely depends on it. As part of a digital economy, their business models rely to a greater extent upon information technology, data extraction and the web (Srnicek 4). Be that as it may, if the platform has arisen as a new business model, it is important to study the ways it transforms contemporary social media and vice versa for the purpose of value and profit. These developments will be scrutinized through the photo-sharing platform, Instagram. As more than five million people are active on Instagram every day and 80 percent of the total users follow a company on Instagram,1 _{this platform is increasingly used by businesses to promote their products or} brand. Considering the large number of users that participate on the platform to get their daily dose of inspiration, Instagram has become a successful platform to discover things, among which new products and services. Since its launch in 2010, the platform has gone through multiple changes and developed many new features. Besides the platform’s changes in design, it has introduced a number of new possibilities ranging from the introduction of hashtags and the “Explore” tab in its early years, to uploading landscape or portrait pictures and videos, Instagram Stories, live video and multiple pictures within single posts (carousel) in recent years. The platform reimagined itself on many different fronts, and some of its main newly introduced features were seamlessly integrated with novel ways for Instagram to start monetization efforts. From 2013 onwards, Instagram actively started developing the platform for advertising opportunities since the first photo or video ads were placed in user’s timelines.2 The introduction of ads was perhaps unsurprising following Facebook’s purchase of Instagram in 2012.

1 _{Instagram internal data, March 2017}

The simple and effective advertising solutions offered by Instagram became largely appropriated, and attracted 500,000 monthly advertisers in 2017 (Mccracken). As the platform provides highly visual experiences and immersive mobile technology, Instagram makes the perfect marketing tool to grow brand awareness and prospect new customers. What became another popular way to target potential clients was the use of influencer marketing. Consumers generally trust peer recommendations over traditional brand advertisements (Grimes), so influencers were increasingly incorporated into marketing strategies to establish higher return on investments (ROI). By collaborating with influencers, brands may benefit from their large following and online fame. Whereas influencer ads used to circulate on the platform with solely hashtags within captions such as #sponsored or #ad indicating these were paid advertisements, in 2017 Instagram introduced its “paid sponsorship” feature to create more transparency.

Taking all these changes of the platform into consideration, this study aims to investigate how Instagram reshapes new media advertising practices and takes a critical approach towards the role of the platform. The limited number of academic studies and scholars that concentrate on the Instagram platform and their overall focus on the way the platform defines cultural issues (Roncha and Radclyffe-Thomas), makes it highly relevant to look at the platform from a, so-far little explored, global marketing perspective. In relation to Instagram’s influencer marketing, many studies have focused on influencers on various platforms through a consumerist perspective detailing topics such as authenticity (Hopkins and Thomas), self-curation (Marwick; Wissinger), follower-engagement (Abidin), or users as elements of electronic word of mouth (Erkan). The purpose of this study is to address Instagram as a new media business model, and to look at the producers of changes in the digital advertising landscape rather than its recipients.

The first part of this study will examine the contemporary advertising environment influenced by new media practices. New notions of economy are explored, such as the digital economy or the attention economy, that manifest the electronic age. As LaPlaca points out, there has been an enormous growth of data that requires better examination. The increasing importance of e-commerce based on the collection of user data brings up new criticisms surrounding the private lives of people being exploited to sell products and services. It is even argued that personal lives have become an industry of real-time billboards (Abidin), which relates to the role of electronic word-of-mouth in today’s marketing environment. When businesses are constantly under pressure to accommodate to shifting advertising trends and practices, it is important to reckon the role of platforms in enabling changes in this industry. An important concept to talk about these changes is through the notion of labour. As more data is appropriated by incorporations every day, the idea of free labour became increasingly relevant.

In the second part, the main focus will be on platform affordances. Instagram as a platform or interface structures users’ actions by what it provides or furnishes, making certain uses more likely than others (Stanfill). Being guided by these affordances, Instagram may too influence the way advertising should be practiced and help develop new strategies. One of these strategies is creating a sense of intimacy between brands and customers, to ensure deeper and longer lasting business relationships build on the illusion of interconnectedness. Intimacy is used by brands and influencers as a new business strategy, and is translated into their current forms of advertising.

Finally, an examination of multiple case studies will give an objective, systematic and qualitative description of how the platform has changed to serve the role of advertising. The first case has a central focus on the co-productive activities of users in helping create economic value for brands. This will be scrutinized through a highly successful Instagram campaign in terms of reach and engagement by the brand Adidas, in collaboration with artist and celebrity Selena Gomez. By organizing a contest called #Myneoshoot, this case highlights the encouragement of brands for user-generated content as free brand publicity. In the second case, an analysis of an Instagram Stories campaign by teeth whitening company HiSmile focuses on the practice of data aggregation to reach a new demographic. A global campaign was set up featuring Conor Mcgregor in the brand’s Ad Stories to micro-target a young male audience. In the last case, the marketing and advertising strategy of fashion and accessories brand Kate Spade New York is explored. In doing so, the online brand presence and the introduction of Instagram’s new shoppable posts feature are studied in conjunction with the affordances of the platform, that have become increasingly tied to retail.

1. ADVERTISING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Without question, large tech firms such as Google, Amazon and Facebook have become important economic actors in a new media business landscape. Driven by the pressure of continuous market innovation, these leading technology companies always need to stay on top of new trends and developments in order to make the most profit. The digital economy fuels emerging new technologies and resembles a deep focus on economic development. The appropriation of data is central to this development. Data has become a key factor in the relationship between firms on the one hand and workers, consumers or competing businesses on the other (Srnicek 6). The new business model emerging from these relations is a dominant new type of company: the platform (Srnicek 42).

Platforms are in essence technological infrastructures that permit interaction between two parties or more (Srnicek 44). If we consider platforms as markets, multiple definitions of platforms such as ‘two-sided markets’, ‘multi-sided markets’, or ‘multi-sided platforms’ come into play (Rochet and Tirole; Evans; Rysman). These economic approaches towards digital platforms are often closely related to the concept of network effects. As a two-sided infrastructure, digital platforms are based on the core principle that a platform becomes more valued as more people are active on the platform. In other words, “one group’s benefit from joining a platform depends on the size of the other group that joins the platform” (Evans and Schmalensee 151). As a result, big platforms generally become even bigger while smaller platforms get left behind.

Since the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s – a period of rapid growth in internet usage and extreme speculation – we have witnessed significant economic changes. When the bubble burst, an important framework was built for a new business mentality. As a consequence of the collapse, provision of venture capital and equity financing were no longer the norm. Therefore, internet based companies faced new pressures to make revenues (Srnicek 51). Inspired by the motto ‘get large or get lost’, dot-com dot-companies used the get-big-fast strategy to control network effects that allowed them to gain market share at a fast rate. Pursuing growth before profits was the new business model, and could be achieved by offering free products or services to build a successful brand image in order to demand higher rates in the future. Due to the free services however, sooner or later these companies needed to find an effective way to generate revenue. Hence, when the bubble burst these companies saw one major solution: advertising (Srnicek 52)

User data was no longer just appropriated to improve one’s services, it had also become a way to accumulate advertising profit (Srnicek 52). This can be seen as a broader trend within the attention economy, that benefits off labour that is implicitly creative but at the same time economically abusive (Abidin 87). In the case of Instagram, users produce and reproduce a large amount of advertising content through the use of hashtags, reposts and tags without receiving any form of payment (Abidin 87). As

market their products or services for free. Considering that 68 percent of all Instagram users regularly engage with brands and their advertisements through likes, comments and shares3_{, most companies} would disregard an opportunity for optimizing profit by not operating on this platform.

Advertorial practices in digital marketing

Crystal Abidin identifies three different genres of advertisements on Instagram that can be used as a framework to understand digital advertising. These genres of advertorial practices are dissemination, instigation and aggregation (Abidin 88), and as will be demonstrated throughout this chapter, produce two dominant types of free labour: brands encouraging users to produce advertising content, and the collection and exchange of personal data.

Abidin describes dissemination as the simple act of posting content such as a photo on the platform so it will be available in the feeds of that person’s or brand’s followers (88). This is a one-way form of communication that requires action only from the sender, not so much from the receivers. The purpose is to spread content. Instigation however is not solely about spreading a message; it also actively stimulates followers to reproduce the message so its effect and number of recipients will be increased. In the case of social media contests, followers are often requested to repost or ‘regram’ the same content that was shared with them or produce content inspired by the initial post (Abidin 89). The Adidas NEO campaigns are a good example. In 2015, Instagram users could use the #myneoshoot hashtag introduced by Adidas to post their own pictures wearing the advertised product, and make a chance on winning the contest. Such hashtags dedicated to specific campaigns are often used to easily discover and increase the collective presence of a particular thread, serve branding purposes, or stimulate interaction and conversation (Abidin 89). As a result, “followers become a network of advertorial capillaries by duplicating, amplifying and multiplying the Influencer content to their own circle of followers and personal friends” (Abidin 89). This demonstrates the potentially exploitative traits of digital advertising that uses ordinary social media users as promotion instruments while benefiting from their free labour. One of the ways to stimulate advertising revenue then, is to utilize users as human publicity posters that circulate online.

This phenomenon can be further explored through the concept of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). The advertising industry has gone through considerable changes after the dot-com bubble as new business models were required to engage with critical and inpatient internet users. Brand management became more and more implicated due to disruptive developments in the market driven by the debut of social media as new touch points, such as the ways a consumer can interact with a business (Dahan and Hauser). With so many goods on the (online) market, it can be difficult as consumer to choose what product to buy. That is why most people like to have a trusted opinion that enables them to make the right choice. Whereas traditional word-of-mouth (WOM) has proved to be an important factor

in consumers’ buying decisions (Richins and Root-Schaffer), eWOM makes it even easier to find opinions or reviews on something you are interested in buying. In fact, it is claimed to influence purchasing outcomes the most today (Manafy).

eWOM can be defined as “any positive or negative statement made by a potential, actual or a former customer which is available to a multitude of people via the internet” (Hennig-Thureau et al. 39). As the opinion of other consumers is generally more trusted than those of advertisers, marketers stimulate consumer-to-consumer (C2C) eWOM with online discounts or free products and services (Ryu and Feick), much like social media contests. eWOM can therefore be seen as another marketing strategy used by businesses to employ users as brand advocates with either minimal or no remuneration. The relationship between businesses and consumers is one of co-creation, a “collaborative activity in which customers actively contribute to the creation of brand identity and image as well as ideas, information, product, service and experience offered under a particular brand” (Bogoviyeva 371). This idea is not new, but builds upon relations of production already described by Marx and Engels. They argued that the bourgeoisie or the ruling class cannot function without continuously revolutionizing the relations of production (12). In a post-Fordist society, the dominant socio-economic system from the late 20th century, these relations have increasingly been transformed into a structure of coproduction, in which a consumer coproduces economic value. This value can be understood as the “capacity of goods, services or activity to satisfy a need or provide a benefit to a person or legal entity.” (Haksever et al. 292). The company in this case benefits from the free contributions in promotion and advertising produced by users, while the users themselves may feel rewarded by the opportunity of personal input.

According to Christian Marazzi, coproduction is now the central strategy of public and privatized businesses and concerns all major performances that assist to the creation of the market (51). This active contribution of consumers in these performances, albeit voluntarily, makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between producers and consumers. To encourage participation in the process of co-production – for example by stimulating consumers to share a message with their followers – the company benefits from the connections between users and profits of higher engagement levels: metrics of likes, shares, and comments. As Instagram has the largest user group (53 percent) connecting with brands out of all social platforms (Weise), marketers do not just use the platform to reach consumers, but also to turn them into their individual brand campaigners (Beltrone).

Although consumers may benefit from eWOM by reducing the risk of buying the wrong products, companies seem to benefit from it the most considering both organic and amplified eWOM could positively impact the sales of their products. Organic eWOM is the natural process of sharing experiences with a brand or product and does not involve any interference or encouragement from businesses to provide an opinion (Godes and Mayzlin). Thoughts or reviews are shared voluntarily between consumers to express whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied about products and services.

consumers to talk about the brand or commodity that is being sold. These campaigns are used increasingly to influence the number of people that talk about the company and the way they do. To control this process, companies need to conduct close examination of data and content to identify the right social media figures or opinion leaders to promote their product to (Kulmala, Mesiranta and Tuominen 22), as well as to have them promote the product to others.

That brings me to the second way companies benefit from social media users’ free labour: the extraction and collection of data. This will be discussed in relation to Abidin’s third genre of advertorial practices: aggregation. Advertorial aggregation requires a form of labour from users as it encourages followers to interact with the content or information that was shared by responding to it directly. The most popular strategies to ensure these direct interactions are organizing contests or giveaways, ‘follow-backs’, and ‘shout-outs’ (Abidin 88). Contests are generally organized by brands or a person that is sponsored by the brand and ask followers to like, comment, share, tag friends, leave reviews, or follow certain steps to have a chance on winning a prize. But more importantly, online competitions can be an easy way to accumulate information from followers (Abidin 88). By leaving these likes, comments or other meta-information, users give insights to the brand or company that can be used for business development. Follow-backs occur when popular profiles with a large following will follow some of their followers back (Abidin 88), making these followers feel special or privileged. A follower will feel even more important if he or she is mentioned in a ‘shout-out’. Being mentioned by a famous ‘Instagrammer’ will give an unknown person the chance to be noticed among a lot of Instagram users that follow the account of the message. In fact, reaching large audiences has become so important that even online marketplaces have been created for selling and buying social media shout-outs.4

As a benefit from these direct interactions, brands identify key information that helps them to create advertisements tailored to the right audiences and to collaborate with the right social media personalities. Either the brand or partner of the brand generally archives the information extracted from interactions with particular pieces of content, for example when feedback is used to improve product or consumer experiences, or when tagged users are saved in a system of possible future clients (Abidin 89). The assemblage of data could be seen as a natural result of the attention economy, in which human attention becomes more and more scarce. According to Davenport and Beck, attention can be defined as “focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and we decide whether to act” (20). Now that content is always within hand’s reach, the restricting actor in consuming information is attention.

When attention has become so valuable, it is essential for brands to target only the right users with their ads. The right users are generally those people who may have already expressed interest or engagement in the brand, the product, or something similar in the past, which was then recorded as data.

4_{www.shoutcart.com, “the largest social media influencer marketplace, offering analytics, engagement metrics}

Platforms like Instagram enable brands to discover users’ impulses and motivations to have a better understanding of what converts them into buying, by providing the infrastructure that brands can use to communicate with users directly (Roncha and Radcliffe-Thomas 306), and more importantly, that allows them to collect data.

Data is the new oil

Due to the emergent economy of widespread data collection, the phrase “data is the new oil” became popular to reflect the growing perception of data as an increasingly valuable commodity (The Economist). Although the web was generally considered to be an open and democratic space, it is now widely used to automatically classify data and extract value from users’ information. The translation from data into economic value is a topic of much debate today5 _{and brings up concerns about data} exploitation by dominant tech companies holding large market shares or striving for monopolization. As most people cannot imagine going through their day anymore without checking Facebook, Instagram or using the Google search engine (The Economist), they are continuously providing more data. Being able to control all this data provides tech companies or online platforms immeasurable power.

This power relies upon computed algorithms that classify users into categories of identity, enabling a mode of control in which “the automated categorization practices and the advertisements and content targeted to those categorizations effectively situate and define how we create and manage our own identities” (Cheney-Lippold 177). Power is constructed through a number of processes, starting with the collection of data, to the automated and algorithmic categorization of data, to the ability of targeting users based on the classified data and nudging them into certain behavior. Essentially, the activities of users are converted into scores so they are ranked above or below other users in a certain category (Citron and Pasquale 3). When marketers started using the web and could extract data from its users, this opened up new possibilities to get a deeper and more precise understanding of their identities and to build cognitive understandings upon these clusters of data (Turow). Thanks to automated processes it is possible “to extract information from the raw data in databases – information that is expressed in a comprehensible form and can be used for a variety of purposes” such as prediction or interference (Witten and Frank 23). To allow for interference, user data needs to be collected and appropriated to sustain results according to classifications. Consequently, the strength of automated data categorization is that it gives an insight of “who we are, what we want, and who we should be” (Cheney-Lippold 177). This knowledge gives brands the power to influence our (buying) behavior, and to steer our interests.

According to Fourcade and Healy, individuals are reduced to a mode of capital based on their digital profiles that are evaluated by online grading and rating systems, and turn them into regulatory devices with often segregating effects (9). Depending on the amount of collected data, detailed profiles can be constructed for precise microtargeting, disregarding the feasibility of user exploitation to serve a brand or company’s commercial purposes. That is, online platforms can be remediated to “feed the ever-expanding appetite of private agencies and data brokers who re-sell [data] to third parties” (Fourcade and Healy 11). These exploitative traits of data appropriation have largely been discussed under one particular concept.

For critical scholars of data collection, the democratic promises of the web concealed the significant shift to profit-making based on the exploitation of ‘free labour’ (Terranova). According to this idea, the users of platforms such as Google, Facebook as well as Instagram – which use advertising as major monetizing practices – provide labour in the form of data or content without receiving a wage or remuneration for it even if this data is actively collected and sold to advertisers. Although important, it is commonly overlooked as form of capital in the digital economy (Terranova 33). While users may benefit from data appropriation by receiving only information that is of interest to them, it is the company that extracts actual money value from this data aggregation.

Free labour on platforms or the web can be seen as “simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (Terranova 34). Data is both voluntarily given and enjoyed as the social activities that involve the provision of data are generally not considered as work. Uploading information onto social networks such as pictures, status updates, interests or even likes, comments, clicks and tags is part of most people’s daily activities. That is, “the instruments of digital labour are indeed everywhere; they are fast-changing and invisible. Without being recognised as labour, our location, input, and tracked mobility become assets that can be turned into economic value” (Scholz and Liu). Facebook is the perfect example of extracting large economic value from user data.

With the help of user data, Facebook generated an annual advertising profit of roughly 17 billion dollars in 2017 (Statistica). According to research by Joler and Petrovski, Facebook ‘digital workers’ spend around 20 minutes per day providing data by likes, comments, and scrolling through the timeline which results in more than 300 million hours of free labour on a daily basis (Sharelab). On top of that, Facebook owns several other companies that enable the assemblage and circulation of even more data between them. As Instagram was purchased by Facebook in April 2012, the platform had to play its part by actively bringing in more data on user activities. Although the Facebook family claims this data is collected and shared between companies to support their platform or optimize services (Joler and Pretrovski), the privacy policy indicates additional uses of data. When Instagram updated its policy and terms in 2012, not only could the platform share all user data with its parent company, but also with third parties and advertisers (Instagram). As Facebook was already actively collecting user information for advertising, its ad network was now even further expanded for more detailed and effective targeting.

According to Instagram’s updated policy,

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you. (quoted in Baldwin)

This policy update was heavily critiqued by users (Baldwin). It was not a matter of improving one’s services or helping the user, but rather the feeding of a strategy that would turn out to be worth billions in turnover. These large amounts of profits generated from the information of users raise questions about the real purpose of data assemblage. It does not stop with the collection of data. After raw data6 is collected, it needs to be processed in order to provide meaningful information that can then be sold to other companies or advertisers. The vast market for data commerce demonstrates the commodification of our personal information on a wide scale, and can be considered as a new form of exploitation. At the same time, the small differences between labour and culture as well as production and consumption, point out that internet users are not merely ‘digital slaves’ producing value. Most of their data is generated through daily activities that are social or cultural and are generally not considered as work. Free labour therefore exists when consuming culture converts into production that is both accepted or even pleasing, and taken advantage of (Terranova 37).

The increasingly intersected domain of labour and culture on the web as a consequence of creative output makes it difficult to maintain clear distinctions between the two. Though the internet was foreseen to be an open network of decentralized, democratic and enjoyable production of culture (Terranova), it did not exactly turn out to be that. Early users of the internet blamed this development on the role of e-commerce, that would break the free economy of the web (Terranova). In this free economy, collaboration is a central concept that stimulates internet users to produce and consume on the web without paying one another. As it was only a matter of time before brands and advertisers would find ways to monetize on the web, traditional conceptions of labour needed to be renegotiated.

Controversies of free labour

The notion ‘free labour’ is often used to approach capitalization of the web but raises several questions. Should we really describe our online activities as labour? Is it the users who perform the labour? Are all of our social interactions turned into data profit that we should speak of a ‘collective’ free labour?

According to Terranova, “free labor […] is not necessarily exploited labor” (47). It is both unpaid and enjoyed, but not imposed. Users give up information from social interactions in favor of communicating on the platform and enjoying its interactive uses. As such, users are essential in keeping a platform alive through their interactions and time spent on accessing the platform and enabling advertising, providing likes or comments and engaging in online conversations (Terranova 48).

The collection of user data signifies

a privatization of the wealth produced by free labor that takes the shape of an impoverishment of potential users’ appropriation of the fruits of such labor. This impoverishment can be understood in terms of the unilateral appropriation and hence accumulation of the wealth generated by users’ interactions (both personal data, which become property of the company, and the general activity of sharing, posting, linking, commenting, etc.). (Terranova 53)

Although the financial profit of data appropriation is one-sided, the benefits are not. Value is not only expressed in money or turnover, the value that lies in social interactions is also one of the user. Users willingly interact on a platform out of joy and personal importance. If we want to be liberated from free labour according to Terranova, data profits need to be recovered to the producers of data (the users), and secondly, social media platforms should become public instead of privatized companies so that users will gain control and decide over their data (53). This however requires a major transformation of today’s economy and platforms’ business models. Moreover, if users do not consider their data production as a form of labour or an activity that is vulnerable to exploitation, they may not see the need to own or control data themselves.

The blurred distinction between labour and non-labour is a result of the increased immateriality of labour. Immaterial labour is an autonomist Marxist concept that describes how cultural and knowledge work rather than material work create value today and are reduced to commodities. According to Lazzarato, immaterial labour is distinctive to all workers in the post-industrial society as labour became more and more digitized and not consistently considered as work (Terranova 41). Whereas material work in industrial societies took place in the factory and tasks were clearly defined, the production of immaterial goods is harder to measure (Keucheyan 93). That is, material production in the workplace “presupposes that labour-time is discrete and measurable” and is clearly distinct from free time (Keucheyan 93). The production of data however, does not take place in a defined work place, and blurs with people’s free time. Interactions on social media are created continuously so that ‘work’ is performed all day, every day. This implies that “‘work’ is now synonymous with ‘life’.” (Keucheyan 93). And considering there is no longer a clear distinction between work and life, perhaps we should reconceptualize free ‘labour’ to define the actions of users in producing data.

Another criticism of free labour follows the performers of labour. As explained by Joler and Petrovski, data is part of the raw materials that serve merely as a resource, while algorithms are actually responsible for the work (Sharelab). In other words, “data, content and metadata are the objects of labour and they are created by humans, but the labour itself is performed by algorithms.” (Sharelab). Billions of photos, updates, comments, or profiles are analyzed and categorized by algorithms in order for this data to mean something concrete. The raw data that users provide are continuously polished to be targeted more precisely (Sharelab), a process that relies on an increasing income of information to develop exact results. According to Srnicek, “advertisers are interested less in unorganized data and more in data that give them insights or match them to likely consumers. […] They have had some process applied to them, whether through the skilled labour of a data scientist or the automated labour of a machine-learning algorithm.” (57). As the scientist or the algorithms perform most of the labour rather than the users, the notion of free ‘labour’ should not (exclusively) address this phenomenon from a user perspective. Additionally, most of our online interactions are not translated into data that generate profit (Srnicek 54). Platforms are continuously innovating, developing and building new infrastructures in order to extract more data that can be valued. That is because most of our interactions are in fact not going through a process of valorization (Srnicek), so newer or larger amounts of data are constantly pursued. Valuation can take place both as data valuation of individuals, and value extraction from individuals. Yet not all of our data is useful, hence the automated algorithms that rank and categorize our information. To get a larger picture of a user’s profile, additional information is necessary that cannot always be extracted from social media interactions. Google for example, does not just rely on users free ‘labour’, but on a variety of intel like “economic transactions, information collected by sensors in the internet of things, corporate and government data (such as credit records and financial records), and public and private surveillance” (Srnicek 54, 55).

This does not mean social media interactions have become less important. On the contrary, if we consider a specific group of social media users, we can identify a third type of free labour that is neither directly stimulated by brands nor collected through data generation. This group exists of those users, mostly women, who provide social media work based on career motivations and identify themselves as bloggers, professional ‘Instagrammers’, or influencers. The group can be defined as follows:

Influencers are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in digital and physical spaces, and monetise their following by integrating ‘advertorials’ into their blog or social media posts. (Abidin).

These influencers are also immersed in a blurred territory of culture and labour, or leisure and labour, and aim to turn their passion into their work. In her book (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:

Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work, Duffy studied to what degree these passions actually paid

off (ix). Can you really be paid to do what you love? Despite this is most bloggers’ motivation, there are generally only a few that become truly successful. According to Duffy, “the rest are un(der)-paid, remunerated with deferred promises or ‘exposure’ or ‘visibility’, even as they work long hours to satisfy brands and convey authenticity to observant audiences” (x). It is evident that within this field of work, the performer of labour is the human platform user, not a computed algorithm. This particular user may even feel the mental or physical efforts accompanied with this sort of labour due to the pressure to work hard, make consistent appearances, schedule posts for (international) audiences, and be accessible on a 24/7 basis.

The work from individuals that dream to adopt social media to make a living, is what Duffy recognizes as ‘aspirational labour’, “a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.” (4). The internet is full of online articles that tell the success stories of Instagram users making large amounts of money with just a single post, travelling the world, or receiving free products and services. Many of these stories however do not resemble the majority of influencers or Instagrammers. To that group, social media production can be a way of creative expression or pleasure, even if they “also believe that they will benefit professionally from such value-generating activities” (Duffy 46). These activities can take up so much of an individual’s time, that their (free) publicity actions can turn into a full-time career by themselves (Duffy 74). Their promotional activities can be both self-promotion – you have to be active on the platform in order to be discovered by others – or brand and product promotion. For lifestyle and fashion bloggers it is conventional to tag the brands or products displayed in their photos so their followers can easily find them, but at the same time brands benefit from their free advertising. It is important for these individuals to be noted. According to the popularity principle, the more contacts you have, the more people will want to connect with you which makes you more valuable (van Dijck). Accordingly, “the reach of [social media] content […] either allows or precludes her from being admitted to any number of the ad networks that are billed as invitation only; after being vetted, these metrics dictate her compensation rate” (Duffy 79). In other words, your value is based on your popularity, often expressed in number of followers. In the following chapter, the role of social media influencers will be discussed into more detail.

In this chapter I have discussed how the contemporary digital advertising landscape is defined by the emergence of the platform as a new business model. After the dot com bubble, the use of advertising became a common way to make profit as (tech) companies had to generate revenue to compensate for their free services (Srnicek). Advertising can be used for different goals, which is illustrated by Abidin through different genres of advertorial practices. As a result of these practices, I

have identified three different types of free labour and their controversies. Due to advertorial instigation, users are encouraged by brands to produce free advertising content. Conjointly, the stimulation of eWOM converts users into co-producers of economic value for companies or brands (Marazzi). In the practice of aggregation, value is extracted from the exchange of personal data. Users voluntarily provide data or content without financial compensation which is then categorized and sold to advertisers. Having this information, marketers can specifically target potential clients. Finally, as neither a result of instigation nor aggregation, there is a specific group of users who provide free labour out of professional aspirations. The social media production of professional ‘Instagrammers’ can be taken as an example here. As in all cases, ‘labour’ is increasingly blurred into free time or considered as cultural, work often becomes equivalent to life (Keucheyan), and cannot clearly be defined as labour. The notion of free labour from a user perspective is further implicated by taking algorithms into account as the major performers of labour, that process and analyze data opposed to users who ‘merely’ provide data as a byproduct of their daily activities.

2. PLATFORM AFFORDANCES

Launched in 2010, Instagram is a mobile application for easily capturing and sharing personal memories through photos or videos. Being on Instagram allows users to stay updated of their friends or families lives, or discover new accounts from all over the world that share interesting content. With an international community of more than 500 million users, Instagram is the number one photo and video sharing platform (Instagram). This success is perhaps explained by Instagram’s introduction of different features combined and integrated into a single mobile platform, such as creative filters or editing tools, location tagging and instant photo and video sharing. These basic features have been restructured and augmented over the years alongside the introduction of many new features that contributed to shaping cultural trends in and outside the platform.

In this chapter, the concept of affordances will be used to study the platform structures of Instagram, and the ways in which they mediate the users. The concept was originally termed by Gibson in ecological psychology to describe relationships of allowance between people and artefacts (Gibson), and was later utilized in design studies (Norman). It has also been adopted to study the interplay of technology and social developments (Leonardi and Barley; Zammutto et al.). In this study, the term ‘affordances’ is used as an approach to analyze what actions material objects or media technologies permit to the user (Bucher and Helmond 3). Considering that most research in the past has focused on affordances and social media through studies of platforms like Twitter (Bucher and Helmond; Black et al.), Facebook (Kaun and Stiernsted; Fox and Moreland) and YouTube (Halpern and Gibbs), it is important to lay out a framework of affordances for the platform Instagram. To do so, this chapter will explore the types of social behavior that affordances precipitate, and scrutinize their relation to commerce and advertising on the platform.

Before we can understand the meaning of affordances for platforms and their way of structuring relationships or certain behavior, we must first interpret the concept as it was originally introduced. Similar to the technology of platforms today, Gibson described – using an overall focus on the animal and the environment as surfaces – how “the composition and lay-out of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford” (127). In other words, the affordances of an environment, structure or technology, are what it offers, allows or furnishes (Gibson 127). Affordances constitute the context for social practices that shape or allow specific behavior, and can be both physical and phenomenal or mental. According to Gibson, “an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property […]. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior” (129). To study the affordances of the platform then, is to study both what is inherent to the structures of the platform and the behavior it constitutes.

Even if we may try to change the substances or affordances of an environment, we will still conform to its substructures in multiple ways as we are actually formed by the environment. The structures that we live in, simultaneously create us (Gibson 130). The affordance of something will not be altered by a changing need of the actor. That is, a structure provides what it provides based on what it is (Gibson 139). Nonetheless, affordances rely on interaction, given that, as Gibson explains, “behavior affords behavior” (135). If certain behavior on a platform is allowed and normalized, it is likely that other users will take over the same behavior. The affordances are designed to trigger these types of social behavior. The most fundamental argument of Gibson then, is that we do not see or comprehend the environment as it is, but make sense of it via its affordances or what actions it allows.

It is important to study the affordances of digital platforms, as “defining social media by describing what kinds of behaviours they typically afford across various organisations is one way researchers can transcend the particularities of any technology or its features, and focus on communicative outcomes.” (Treem and Leonardi 147). Identifying the affordances of social media platforms helps to gain a better-defined understanding of why, when and how social media application changes in for example brand practice (Treem and Leonardi 147). Although it is possible that not all the affordances of a structure are observed and the user may not know how to translate them into action (Earl and Kimport 33), studying affordances provides a deeper comprehension of actions that are carried out in the context of mediating technologies.

Based on Gibson’s theory of affordances, platforms can be seen as environments. Like the environment, a social media platform constitutes the domain or system with preconditions, providing a framework for certain behavior and (inter)actions to take place in. While each platform may have nuanced differences in its conditions, the affordances of most platforms “relate not only to end-users and their activities but also to third-parties such as developers who extend the affordances offered by the platform, and advertisers who monetize platform activities” (Bucher and Helmond). This will be explored further by studying the affordances of Instagram, that constitutes a context of relations increasingly connected to merchandise and advertising.

Stanfill elaborates on the concept of affordances by relating it to new media. Using a discursive interface analysis, she discusses affordances and their productive power. According to Stanfill, web interfaces or platforms can be seen as “both reflecting social logics and non-deterministically reinforcing them” (1060). The design or structure of a platform implies certain purposes or modes of use based on the available knowledge of users. Using this knowledge, a range of possibilities can be programmed into the object (Stanfill 1060). This is closely related to what Galloway and Thacker describe as ‘protocol’, a series of tendencies that function on such a degree that is both ‘anonymous and nonhuman’ due to its implication in technology that no specific person controls and is yet controlled (5, 28, 39). Contrary to their perspective of control as a limiting factor, this study does not merely exert a negative

platforms allow.

As stated by Stanfill, affordances “reflect and help establish cultural common sense about what users do (and should do), producing the possible and normative rather than acting on any particular individual” (1061). These normative relations signify how affordances are more than the features or functions of the platform, and go beyond the attributes, aspects or the way something operates in a particular way. Examining affordances requires broad scrutiny, that is, “the features, but also what is foregrounded, how it is explained, and how technically possible users become more or less normative through productive constraint” (Stanfill 1062). The way platforms are designed or structured, implies certain types of uses by those interacting with the platform and actions that users tend to perform in the constructed environment. As a result, there is an assumption of what users should do within the interface of the platform, that acts to “configure the user” (Hutchby 451). This assumption represents the ideal use of the platform, conforming to how it was intended or designed to be used.

As affordances are more than properties of users or artifacts, affordances should be understood as relational (Treem and Leonardi 146). The affordances of a platform are vulnerable to change when used in different conditions while its materiality or design stays the same. Using the case of a social media platform, we can make better sense out of this relational structure between digital environments on the one hand, and the mediation of users on the other. Taking the example of Instagram, studying the design and features of the platform will be augmented with an affordances approach.

From features to affordances

When Instagram launched, it started out with a number of main functions. As a core activity, users upload photos onto the platform with the possibility of using various filters to edit their content, and add extra information such as tags and location details. Providing a reverse-chronological timeline, liking and commenting functions, and open or pre-approved follower relationships, Instagram initiated leveraging many key affordances similar to other popular social platforms (McNely). In January 2011, hashtags were introduced on Instagram as a way to get photos or videos discovered by new audiences, and later with the use of business accounts, as a way to get important new insights such as hashtag reach. By making hashtags specific and as relevant as possible, photographs could stand out from other content and attract the attention of users with similar interests (Instagram). The idea of discovering was further enhanced by the introduction of the ‘Explore’ tab in 2012, which showed popular photos or videos, content at nearby locations, and a search function (Constine). The tab was updated several times in the following years, based on newly introduced features such as trending tags and places, or Instagram Stories. In 2013, the first video function was added to the platform, enabling users to post 15 second videos with filters. This function was updated to 60 second videos in 2016, and to multiple-video posts in 2017 (Strange; Constine). At the end of 2013, Instagram Direct was announced and allowed users to send private messages including photos and videos. Two years later, the possibility of conversation

threads with text messages was added to this feature (Setalvad). This was also the year that Instagram enabled users to upload landscape and portrait photos on their feeds for the first time, rather than square photos only. One of the most important developments however, took place in August 2016 when Instagram Stories was presented by the platform.

Similar to Snapchat’s functionality, with Instagram Stories users were now able to take photos, edit them with filters and effects, and add them to their temporarily visible ‘story’, a new content section in the Instagram app at the top of users’ feeds. At the end of the year, the feature was expanded with the possibility for users to live broadcast, after which the video would initially disappear but was later reconfigured to stay visible to followers for 24 hours (Constine 2016; Constine 2017). At the beginning of 2017, advertisements were implemented in Stories as a way of integrating more adverts in the platform. Presenting skippable ads, users would come across five-second photo and fifteen-second video ads between watching stories of the people they follow. As 150 million people were using Stories every day at that time, the integration of ads into Stories was a way to monetize that audience (Constine). Businesses on the other hand, have access to reach and engagement analytics of their Stories, such as replies and exits from users. These ads are sold on a ‘cost-per-1000-impressions’ based model in which every single view counts as an impression (Constine).

In May 2017, Instagram added the ‘Location Stories’ function as part of Instagram Stories to the explore tab, in which the content of public stories at a specific location are assembled and presented on a “business, landmark, or place’s Instagram page” (Constine). This new function allowed users to see what is going on at a certain place through the lens of a stranger. It also enables an increasingly personal or authentic view of many different locations, like getting a look behind the scenes. From a brand perspective, this feature empowers businesses with an accumulated feed composed of many different user stories showcasing their store, restaurant, products or services for free, therefore indirectly stimulating the practice of advertorial instigation. Though there are also advantages for users like being able to see if “a bar is full and lively, if a band has gone onstage yet before you show up, […] or even check the real-time, hyperlocal weather somewhere”, in the long run, Location Stories can be a way of stimulating profit if Instagram enables brands to insert paid ads, or administer what is visible in their location story (Constine).

In 2017, Instagram added ‘poll’ stickers to Stories that enabled users to create a statement or question with two options that followers can vote on (Gartenberg). This new feature opened up new possibilities for brands too, seeing that the polling feature is a great way to optimize user engagement. Brands could now link polls to marketing campaigns (such as Airbnb asking followers to guess the location of their travel stories)7_{, ask for the opinion of their customers through polls, or propose} questions to get deeper knowledge of a target audience.

From late 2016, Instagram users were able to privately save photos of other users or brands for later observing as a new feature (Bell). This too, created another business opportunity on Instagram as users could now save the photos or videos of the products that they are interested in buying. The feature was updated in 2017 allowing users to bookmark these photos into separate collections, enabling the categorization of photos. That same year, Instagram introduced Carousel posts: a new function for users and advertisers that permitted them to show up to ten photos or videos in a single post. For advertisers, this new feature “brings another layer of depth to campaigns where people can swipe to view additional photos or videos in a single ad” (Instagram Business). Instagram’s last major development however, was the introduction of ‘shoppable’ posts.

In 2016, Instagram launched a new shopping experience that allowed US brands to tag products in their photos on the platform. Instagram is widely used as a platform for product inspiration and as a result of the shoppable posts feature, Instagram offers the first in-app buying experience. In March 2018, the possibility of immediate shopping on the platform was introduced in eight other countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom8, and is implemented by an increasing number of businesses.

Going deeper into the affordances and the implied uses of Instagram, we can already identify a shift in the potential constituted behavior as a result of the platform’s features. The early functions of the platform largely shaped the social practice of sharing, discovering and becoming inspired. With an overall focus on creating personal connections, sharing unique photos, sending direct messages and creating aesthetic content, the normative behavior on the platform revolved around users interacting with other users based on creating attractive and interesting personal experiences. Accordingly, an important feature of Instagram was the photo and video editing tool, consisting of sixteen different Instagram filters in 2011, enhanced by a new “Lux” filter in 2012, and five new other filters in 2014 (Instagram blog).

From 2014 however, the platform became increasingly focused on monetization. Starting with the implementation of photo and video ads that would appear between the photos on user’s timelines, the affordances of the platform quickly evolved into more advanced ways to influence how users should interact or behave in relation to the platform’s advertising structure, ranging from creating longer videos, carousel ads, ads Stories, to special tools for business accounts. Considering that the platform functions as the environment in which users operate, the Instagram environment was more and more commercialized, its design encouraging users to connect with brands or products. While in 2015 roughly 50 percent of Instagram’s total users followed their favorite brands on the platform (Weise), in 2017, 80 percent of all Instagram users followed at least one business (Instagram). This increase is reasonably

connected to normalized behavior on the platform, reflecting the ideal use of Instagram as seen by the owners or governing actors of Instagram.

2.1 Instagram filters available in 20119

The variety of features that I have outlined above can help businesses that use Instagram to shape their brand’s image through the strategic sharing of photos on the platform (McNely). More precisely, the affordances of Instagram may aid brands to structure the brand’s self-aware, self-disclosive management of ‘public perception’, better known as image-power that is “created strategically using specialized discourse, visuals, sounds, and other forms of ... rhetoric” (Faber). According to McNely,

The adoption of Instagram among professional organizations is significant in that it signals a mobile, visually predominant, ostensibly organic mode of sharing organizational image which differs qualitatively from professional photography in the support of branded communication. Instagram offers a significant technological structure that mediates the brand’s way of constructing the image it wants to promote. Accordingly, Faber argues that “powerful organizations and people are able to influence the ways in which other view them” (36). This can be explained by the congruity principle, the moment when the medium – Instagram in this case – and the promoted brand coincide and become more or less the same in the perception of users (Dahlén 90). Taking into account that the user experience is shaped by the tools and affordances of platforms, these platforms connect us to society and how we perceive it. That is, affordances may entail compound historical behavior and norms that influence the use when interacted with (McNely). The way they mediate users, “is a way of transmitting cultural knowledge”, “a way of shaping human activities, often in typified, regularized and yet localized ways” (McNely).

Platform behaviors

In studying the interaction between users and brands on Instagram, the affordances of the platform normalize a set of different social behaviors that are characteristic for this relationship. Brodie et al. define five elements that can be used as a framework to outline these behaviors of user engagement: sharing, co-developing, socializing, advocating and learning.

Social media platforms can help brands improve or increase their online presence and construct longer lasting relationships with consumers to optimize brand value. These relationships are built on the behavior of sharing, a trend towards engaging in a ‘participatory culture’ in which brands continuously seek for the opinion or perception of users, while users “feel more intimate, positive and creative to brands after starting being more involved in brands’ communities” (Roncha and Radcliffe-Thomas 312). According to Brodie et al.

sharing of personal relevant information, knowledge and experiences through the process of active contributions to the co-creation of knowledge within the online community, reflects the behavioral and/or cognitive dimensions of consumer engagement (111).

What Instagram as a platform provides is an environment that affords interaction and engagement. That is, the platform can be considered as the context of the ad through which users interpret its content and subsequently determine how to interact with it. Dahlén uses the notion of priming to argue how the environment of the platform “activates a semantic network of related material that guides attention and determines the interpretation of the ad” (90). The structure of the platform may thus influence the nonconscious identification or response to words, images or objects. Taking the example of brand or product campaigns on Instagram, photos often go along with a mention of the campaign hashtag (#) and a description or reference to people related to the brand or campaign (McNely). The stimulation of user engagement, earlier defined as the advertorial practice of instigation, makes users become part of a marketing strategy. As such, the design of a highly interactive platform “empowers others to share stories.” (McNely).

Instagram facilitates the relationship between brands and their audiences as a result of the interactive character of the platform and social media overall (Pickton and Broderick; Sashi; Ubeda et al.). By building intimate communities, users feel more inclined to co-develop a brand’s message or even do so organically. Moreover, by using images instead of text – one of Instagram’s main affordances – brands reach higher levels of engagement (Soonius). These images can in turn be constructed strategically by using the color of the brand, the logo or other elements that users can identify with. Being able to identify themselves with brands, users are more engaged with their services or products and can actively contribute to the overall brand strategy. Co-developing then, is the “process where consumers contribute to organisations and/or organisational performance by assisting in the development of new products, services, brands or brand meanings” (Brodie et al. 111).

Affording the behavior of socialization on the platform, Instagram helps to develop a meaningful connection and exchange with actively participating users and encourages the creation of brand communities (Hermida et al,; Muniz and O’Guinn). Socializing signifies two types of interactions, one through which users obtain or evolve certain attitudes, and one through which norms or community language is developed (Longmore). Community language is becoming an increasingly popular topic of study, often scrutinized through the concept of ‘platform vernacular’ to gain a better understanding of how language is shaped and influenced by the configuration or structure of platforms (Gibbs et al.). More precisely, social media platforms such as Instagram have their “own unique combinations of styles, grammars, and logics, which can be considered as […] a popular (as in ‘of the people’) genre of communication.” (Gibbs et al. 257). Besides language, the sharing of mutual interests or beliefs among members of a community, generally constructs a bond (de Valck et al.). Overall, the practice of socialization is further enhanced “through the use of ‘likes’, ‘comments’, and ‘send to’ functions, allowing for a quick spread of the message” (McNely).

As a result of the development of online communities, active participation and brand advocation emerges (Algesheimer). The practice of advocating “is an expression of consumer engagement, which occurs when consumers actively recommend specific brands, products/services, organizations, and/or ways of using products or brands” (Brodie et al.). Producing these activities, users have become increasingly important in functioning as brand ambassadors, or even as producers, suppliers, vendors, or style managers (Fashion futures). As users are part of a brand community, they are socially categorized based on their membership of a specific group. The membership of a social group then generates a certain awareness that aspires the members to further discover and, more importantly, educate about a particular brand (McNely). As a result, some brands consider “customers as [their] biggest evangelists” (Binkley). The design and features of Instagram afford this advocative behavior and community building to take place, thanks to the possibility of following, commenting or being able to share your own experience with a brand through collective hashtags.

Finally, through the behavior of learning, consumers help themselves or others to make better decisions regarding their purchases. In order to learn however, one must be a highly engaged community member (Brodie et al.). These are the users that brands are eager to co-develop with as targeting these customers sections may increase network profitability (Vincent 25). The users are most important in the process of learning as with storytelling, brands can inspire users to “share the message and inform about the brand’s values, mission and vision.” (McNely). If the story promoted by a brand fits the interests and beliefs of the community, it will likely increase or accelerate the spread of the message.

The different types of behaviors that are encouraged by the structure of the platform demonstrate a shift in the relationship between brands and users. What was once a one-way distribution of advertising content created by the brand to be consumed by the user, is now a multi directional relation of sharing,

engaging, and co-developing. Through active engagement with brandpages and their content, users contribute to shaping the brand image while becoming closer connected to the brand.

A new business strategy

This supposed connectedness is a dominant product of Instagram’s affordances as a whole. The modes of behavior that have been discussed in the relationship between brands and users of Instagram, largely conform to the shaping of a new business strategy, one that is based on the principle of intimacy. This strategy is especially visible with brands collaborating with popular social media personas like influencers. In fact, Instagram has become the number one platform for influencer marketing (Morrison), a form of marketing that focuses on influential partners and their power to target potential buyers. Brown and Hayes describe the power of influencers arguing that

marketing doesn’t work because there are too many marketing messages bombarding prospects, all the messages sound the same, and even if your message is heard, prospects don’t believe you. But they do believe influencers (10).

The relational structure that allows users to perceive influencers as trusted brand advertisers, is studied by Abidin to describe how influencers communicate with their followers by creating a sense of intimacy or a personal connection. By expanding on the work of Horton and Wohl (1956) about parasocial relations, she scrutinizes how influencers allocate and generate intimacies in various ways and uses the term ‘perceived interconnectedness’ to describe the communicational structure between influencers and followers (Abidin).

First, to reduce the experienced distance between influencers and followers, most influencers try to maintain a public figure that seems ordinary and just like any other person, and enforce this perception through a responsive way of communicating with the follower community (Abidin). In creating personal or close relations with users, influencers tend to describe them not as ‘fans’ but as ‘followers’ to avoid constructing differences in status and social positions (Abidin), such as the idea that influencers are better than their followers. This may also derive from an explicit choice in Instagram’s design architecture, that enables you to ‘follow’ the accounts you like rather than, for example, to ‘become a fan’. Being able to see your ‘followers’ and ‘following’ in your Instagram profile, this affordance signifies a more personal relationship between people than describing them as fans or admirers. Accordingly, the term ‘fans’ is least popular as it implies “a sense of distance and status elevation between influencers and followers”, while intimacy is all about how friendly and close users feel to the influencer they follow (Abidin). This architecture works similar to influencers being able to ‘heart’ the comments from followers or reply with emoji on Instagram as “a sign of acknowledgement and appreciation.” (Abidin).