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The language of social media contests: A lexical analysis of contests across social platforms
Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing,
10
(3),
249-269
(2023)
Abstract
Contests play an important role in social media content created and facilitated by users generally, and by brands and marketers specifically, in the drive for continued communicative engagement and online participation. This study assesses the language of social media contests by capturing more than 30,000 social media posts relating to contests, and performing a lexical analysis on them to identify major linguistic themes. The findings reveal a mixture of persuasive language tropes, gratitude linkages and platform-specific behaviour across social media contest posts. Implications include the utilisation of social contest language for brand strategy.
Keywords: social contests; social marketing; social branding; social media contests; lexical analysis
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Curt Gilstrap is Associate Professor of Business Communication at the University of Southern Indiana. His research interests include digital marketing, strategic social media, big qualitative data, MARCOMs and teams. He has published and presented on all of these as well as myriad strategic and organisational communication topics. His current investigations include the impact of social media brand communities on brand firms, social commerce platforms and the ways that hybrid teams conceptualise and execute their work.
Sun-Young Park is Associate Professor of Advertising Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research interests include digital and social marketing, corporate social responsibility, health communication campaigns, celebrity endorsements and social media analytics. She has published and presented on these topics as well as additional strategic, digital and health advertising research projects.
