Social Media Marketing: Linguistics & Technology

Abstract

This dissertation, structured as three essays, explores various aspects of modern linguistics and technology with regards to social media marketing through various methods and original datasets. The first essay introduces the linguistic framework of animacy into marketing to explore how brands are perceived as “living” entities by consumers. A novel method for measuring animacy through computational linguistics is developed and demonstrated on a dataset of branded social media posts. The second essay explores the concept of brand activism through the framework of ego involvement, and how consumers engage with brands on social media. This is explored using both social media data and a survey instrument. The third essay returns to the concept of animacy, this time looking at how consumers react to AI generated content on social media. Like the second essay, this is explored through both social media data and a survey. This research aims to advance the understanding of the role linguistics play in several critically relevant areas of marketing science.