Social media marketing through influencers with a particular focus on Instagram and Honeycomb model

This thesis is a desktop study to investigate Influencer marketing on Instagram. It opens up about influencer marketing as a popular and ever-increasing marketing tool. Interest in the field of marketing arose during my internship. The subject of this thesis is based on the personal interest of the author in the area of marketing and the specificity of Influencer marketing. The introduction gives a closer look at the background and influencer marketing of this thesis. The introduction chapter also introduces keywords and research questions. The theoretical framework presents the social media phenomena with different social media approaches and Honeycomb framework for Instagram. This chapter explains the significance of these methods of marketing and the application of these methods in practice. The purposes of research explain the methods used for this thesis, how the data was collected, and how the data are limited and confidential. A method used for data collection was secondary, using the same topic research conducted in the last year or two. The empirical findings clarify the research results that other companies have recently carried out, understanding the viewpoint of marketing experts and consumers. The data collected is presented in the analytical section through theoretical frames, and the application of the data to the theory frames is made clear. In the discussion part of the thesis, conclusions are presented. It is discussed how influencer marketing has a mixed image. In general, people find influencer marketing more trustworthy than traditional ads. This thesis shows that the honeycomb theory by Kietzmann et al. is well suited for the analysis of social media applications and gives consistent insight into the question of conditions for successful social media interaction. Research could continue in the future by extending it to companies that use influencer marketing. Research could be carried out, for example, by interviewing people in companies responsible for social media marketing