Brand Identities and Facebook: A Content Analysis of Photographs and Comments on Brand Pages on Facebook

Brand Identities and Facebook: A Content Analysis of Photographs and Comments on Brand Pages on Facebook

Construction of a brand image using different forms of media has become one of the crucial factors of branding today. The social media is a promising tool to promote ideas to a wider audience, thus it becomes vital for advertising bodies to understand the petite nuances of the medium. This study looks at the role, the profile photos and the cover photos play in the process of identity construction of a brand on Facebook. The Facebook comments are designed in such a way that there are multiple access options to them. The study was conducted on leading brand pages to look for the ways in which the message was decoded in the form of comments. These comments were categorized into different positions of the encoding and decoding theory and were also analyzed for the appeals of rhetoric. The study showed the balance in the comments that are for and against the brand ideology. The study also shows the presence of too much noise in the comments which have no role to play in the brands identities.

I V Sunhith

Department of Media Studies