An Arab perspective on social media: How banks in Kuwait use instagram for public relations

Abstract

This study examines the public relations functions of eight Kuwaiti banks listed in the Kuwait Stock Exchange Market (KSEM) that post on their Instagram accounts. It also uses market-size, organization, and individual level predictors to model Instagram postings. A content analysis of 1,502 posts revealed the banks use Instagram for promotion, information dissemination, community building, and interactive engagement, in that order of prominence. The findings suggest banks operate at the confluence of visual communication through Instagram and integration of religious symbolism to serve a public relations function predicated on image and influence. In doing so, the banks tap into the wellspring of social media use by target publics by navigating a balance between obedience to Allah and meeting bank business objectives. The resulting tension between sacred and secular highlights Arab cultural values and suggests Instagram fosters individualism, which challenges Arab emphasis on collectivism and fractures the notion online platforms can effectively build meaningful relationships that characterize Arab culture. The study posits Instagram is more effective in an Arab context at image building than relationship building, threading the importance of visual communication through social media across Arab culture and global public relations practices.

Causal effects of affordance change on communication behavior: Empirical evidence from organizational and leadership social media use

“…The fourth contribution of the study relates to the research context of organizational social media use. Existing literature has long been xating on why organizations only use social media for one-way communication to serve their business purposes (e.g., Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012), despite the clear evidence of how interactive engagement can bene t them in situations such as corporate crises (e.g., Xu & Xiong, 2020; and intercultural communication (e.g., Al-Kandari, Gaither, Alfahad, Dashti, & Alsaber, 2019). In other words, these previous studies attribute the blame to communicative agents in the process.…”

Personality of Public Health Organizations’ Instagram Accounts and According Differences in Photos at Content and Pixel Levels

“…In addition, the personality traits, except for neuroticism, of public health organizations’ Instagram accounts were predicted from the photo features with an acceptable level of accuracy. Given that the personality of individual users was shown to be predictable from their photo features [ 15 , 34 ], this result can be meaningful in that organizational accounts in social media can be investigated from the perspective of personality which has been employed for examining individual users’ accounts.…”

“…Yet, the share of visual data including photos has been rapidly increasing in social media. Photo-uploading functions are provided in existing social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and photo-centric social media services such as Instagram have become popular, while many studies have been conducted about Instagram in various fields [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. In this vein, the relationships between social media photo features and uploaders’ personality have been examined in previous research [ 5 , 19 ], but only limited kinds of photos such as profiles or selfies were analyzed in those studies.…”

Online engagement as a multimodal discursive practice: The case of Dubai Cares’ Facebook page

“…Despite a wide adoption of the Internet in public relations by corporate and public organizations in Arab countries, particularly in such Gulf countries as Kuwait and the UAE, thanks to an advanced ICT infrastructure (Ayish, 2005; Bashir and Aldaihani, 2017), scholarship on online public relations coming from this region has largely remained at the margin of the debate above (Al-Kandari et al, 2019). The few pioneering studies that have appeared on the subject over the past two decades mainly examined the role of political and socio-cultural factors in shaping public relations practices in Arab countries, particularly the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.…”