Instagram and Malaysia’s Beauty Queen Influencers: Strategies of Self-Branding for Local Fashion Brand Development

Abstract

National title holder beauty queen influencers Instagram contents are filled with product reviews and make up video tutorials. Social media influencers’ share posts via Instagram Stories, Instagram Live and most of the influencers reveal more than they do in their Instagram content feed. Social media influencers are creating a persona on social media for their social media audiences (Liu, Jiang, Lin, Ding, Duan, Xu, 2015). They focus on product reviews and beauty-related conversations with their Instagram followers. Through these tools offered by Instagram and other social media platforms, social media influencers play a role in shaping their audience attitudes towards products and brands (Audrezet, De Kerviler, & Guidry, 2018).  In 2017, the United States had the most profitable beauty pageant industry in the world generating 86.1 billion dollars in revenue, followed by China with 53.5 billion (Lisa, 2018). Between 2004 and 2018, the industry has only continued to grow. In Malaysia itself, in 2018, it grew 5.5% compared to the previous year (Lisa,2019). The beauty pageant industry in Malaysia also benefited as most of the SME invested amount of budget to get their product or services to be featured via social media of these beauty queen influencers. The implication of this paper is to assist potential SME investor on the best alternative of Instagram feature to boost up their product brand awareness via national title holder beauty queen influencers’ Instagram profile.