Decoding City Branding Through Social Media: Overseas Student Perceptions of an Instagram Account
Abstract
Instagram can be used as a mass communication media that can reach a wide audience in the digital world, and Instagram users can be categorized as an active audience to play a role in giving meaning to various accounts, including the official account of Sparkling Surabaya (@surabayasparkling).The purpose of this research is to look at Sparkling Surabaya's Instagram account as City Branding of Surabaya.This type of research is descriptive qualitative.The object of this research is Sparkling Surabaya Instagram and the subject of this research is students who are followers of the Surabaya Sparkling Instagram account.The determination technique uses purposive sampling, with data obtained from in-depth interviews.The method used in this research is encodingdecoding reception analysis method by Stuart Hall, where reception includes perception, thinking, preference, and interpretation.The results obtained from this study indicate that different receptions/meanings by informants based on the experiences and backgrounds of each informant are influenced by internal and external factors of the informants, namely Instagram Sparkling Surabaya is considered still lacking in providing information about the city of Surabaya.