HOW POLITICIAN BRANDED THEMSELVES ON INSTAGRAM: RIDWAN KAMIL’S STUDY CASE

• Main Author: Iqbal Rizqi Sya'ban, Muhammad
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/64523
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

There are more than 3 billion active social media users in the world, out of 7 billion human population in 2019. With 1 billion unique users, Instagram is renowned as the fastest growing platform on social media. Not only used for social purposes, but social media also used as a political tool for politicians to gain engagement and getting more favor in the face of the public. In this case, we see that Ridwan Kamil, the current governor of west java and ex-mayor of Bandung city, is one of them, being the 2nd most followed politician on Instagram with 11 million followers, placing him below our current president, Joko Widodo. This research aims to analyze Ridwan Kamil Instagram on how he branded his social media presence in public. This research uses content analysis and sentiment analysis with TF-IDF (Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency) method. We analyze 70 posts, dividing it into two clusters; Personal Life and Professional Life. They were then derived into ten categories; Daily Life, Humour, Family, and Religion from Personal Life; Policy & Programs, State Development, and Political Issue from Professional Life. The result has shown that Family-related posts were getting the highest average engagement rate (1.739%) followed by Humour-related posts (1.617%); these two categories often reciprocate between major-minor category, making the combination between those two could deliver high engagement. The public also seems to favor more Personal Life-related posts (1.207%) than Professional Life posts (0.896%). Ridwan Kamil also frequently includes himself as photo elements with 55.71% appearance out of all posts that have been analyzed, followed by his Family. In contrast, the appearance of political figures was rarely seen. Based on the Sentiment Analysis, Ridwan Kamil gets mostly positive sentiments in each post (95.7%), leaving only three posts with negative sentiments related to the State Development category. There is also a strong correlation between the posts gap of each category and the average engagement. It has reversive correlation which we believe that Ridwan Kamil still needs to portray himself as 'professional' and expert in his field, while still connected personally by personal posts to perceive himself as a part of the community, a normal human being like us. The findings of this research are expected to give insights to politicians and marketers in formulating their social media presence in this digital era.