Digital Audit of PrettyLittleMarketer.
The brief for this assignment was to assess an influencer or brand's digital communications. For this task, I chose to complete a digital audit on the marketing influencer PrettyLittleMarketer. Within this assignment I also discussed the importance of communities online, relating this to my own experiences online.
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Below you will find some excerpts of this audit, showcasing my understanding of how brands or influencers use different platforms.
"A situational analysis (Smith 2018) of PrettyLittleMarketer shows that she has a strong online presence, primarily through social platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Sophie’s main source of connection to her community of “people in social media” (Miller 2023a) is through Instagram (Miller 2022), where she currently has over fifty-two thousand followers."
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Morton (2020) describes consumers' motivations to follow social media influencers as having 5 sub-categories: information, inspiration, communication, entertainment, and surveillance. My two main motivations for following PrettyLittleMarketer are information and inspiration. Participants of Morton’s (2020) study claimed that for content to be appealing it should be short, original, up to date, and well produced in image and/or sound.
"The offering that drew me into following PrettyLittleMarketer the most was her knowledge and contacts. Through her Instagram and Linkedin platforms, Sophie shares knowledge from her degree and real life experience, as well as hosting webinars for her followers to join that usually have one or more guest speakers (Miller 2023f). I have joined some of these webinars live as well as watched the recorded versions if I was busy at the live time and have found their content extremely helpful in deciding where I would want my career to go, how I’m going to get there, and even basic marketing knowledge."
"From the first album released through to their ten year anniversary last November, I have and always will be a huge fan of The Vamps - a pop band who originated in 2012. Back in school I was an avid Instagrammer, creating multiple fan accounts for this band each posting different styles of content - my most successful being a fan art account where I would draw the band members on my iPad and upload for my almost 3000 instagram followers to see. According to Lambert et al. (2013) to belong is to feel meaningful, and that is exactly how being a part of this fan based community with my account made me feel. In all the dark times and worries about school and exams, I had a meaning. Other fan accounts started asking me questions: “How did you do that piece of work?”, “What apps do you use to do these drawings?” - I was influencing, at a microscopic level. Similarly, Hagerty et al. (1992) define belonging as having two main attributes - experiencing being valued, needed, or important, and fitting in congruence with other people through shared and complementary characteristics. This fan page made me feel extremely valued and it satisfied me how well our community worked and fitted together."