Abby Sowalla - blog #4

Since I’ve had Shakira songs stuck in my head all week, I decided I might as well choose her as my social-media-stalking-subject for this blog. Shakira is on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; she also has music posted on YouTube. Shakira’s most popular account is her Facebook, where, as of 03/11/2020, she has a massive 99.5 million followers. Her next most popular account is her Instagram, where she has 65.6 million followers and follows 98 other accounts. On Twitter, Shakira has 52.1 million followers and follows 212 other accounts. Shakira’s YouTube channel has 28.1 million subscribers.

A quick glance at her Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram reveals that her posts are more or less the same across all platforms. This means that if I followed any one of her social media accounts, I would see nearly all of the posts she made.

The largest portion of Shakira’s posts publicize her music, videos, and tours. She currently has her latest music video, “Me Gusta,” pinned on Twitter. She retweets posts from other pages which mention her music, such as a post by “billboard latin” which linked to an interview with Shakira about her new video. She made posts counting down the release of her latest music video to make sure her audience would get excited for the release and watch it as soon as it came out. These posts counted down the day before the release, the hour before the release, five minutes before the release, and the moment of the release. To keep her audience interested, she included pieces of media, such an official promo video and a short cell-phone-camera video of the set, in her count-down posts.

Shakira regularly posts about her fan’s activities and fan-related accomplishments. On March 7, she thanked her fans for generating 3.2 million views on her new music video within 24 hours. Three days later, she retweeted a piece of fanart depicter her look in her latest video and complemented her fan’s talent. The next day, she retweeted a fan who used her new filter. Scrolling back through her posts, I found that Shakira had retweeted many people on Tiktok who had imitated her Super Bowl dance. This form of audience interaction encourages her fans to be more engaged in the hopes that they too might be retweeted or otherwise recognized by Shakira. Shakira’s posting of her fans’ activities could be considered use of digital labor. Chapter 3 of our course textbook cites the work of Henry Jenkins as it describes how participatory culture allows fans to enjoy engagement with a subject while that subject benefits from usage of their fans’ productions. From her fans’ engagement, Shakira gains materials she can use to engage more fans and encourage further fan-media production. Her fans don’t seem to mind her reposting their work; instead, they are happy that their efforts are being recognized.

Shakira also uses her platform to advocate charitable causes. She used Facebook’s birthday-donation function to raise money for a charity she launched called “Fundacion Pies Descalzos.” She also made posts on National Women’s Day in which she talked about women she admired and working with UNICEF. This behavior reminds me of the notion of “neocapitalism” we discussed in my Critical Media Theory comm class, where a celebrity or business uses affiliation with charitable causes and movements to generate social capital. I imagine Shakira’s fans are very happy and can feel a sense of pride in being her fans when they see that Shakira supports charities and advocates meaningful movements.

Shakira has made many posts which present her in a less presentable, more relatable way. These posts usually involve pictures taken with a call phone camera rather than a professional camera. These photos are accompanied by captions in which Shakira casually mentions what she is doing. For example, Shakira has posted a picture of herself holding a skateboard captioned “Soccer mom and skate mom!” and a picture of herself holding a water bottle captioned “Staying hydrated while putting the finishing touches to my soon-to-be-released video for Me Gusta!” Appealing to a wide audience, Shakira often includes both an English and a Spanish translation of her captions. These types of posts often cause Shakira to appear more authentic, which is a key element of the steps of self-presentation described by Marwick & Boyd (2010). Shakira caters well to a multi-cultural audience which both appreciates her work and wants to relate to her.

Overall, I thought that Shakira’s social media usage was very thorough. She has a good system for publicizing and creating hype around her music and videos. She encourages fan engagement and creates an image of herself which is caring, genuine, and relatable. She caters successfully to a broad audience and has generated millions of followers as a result.

I have little to offer in terms of opportunities for her to improve her social media usage. If anything, I might encourage her to experiment with making different posts on her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to see if she can encourage audience members to engage with her on more than one platform.