AUTHENTICITY VERSUS EXPLOITATION: HOW CORPORATE AMERICA COMMUNICATES WITH LGBTQ+ AUDIENCES ON INSTAGRAM

The past few years have seen an increase in public support for the LGBTQ+ community from large, influential companies that have historically marginalized queer folks and contributed to their erasure on media platforms. This thesis aims to analyze and critique how these fortune 500 companies use discourse and symbols to strategically communicate with LGBTQ+ audiences on social media. Few studies exist that investigate the link between LGBTQ+ support and social media marketing for fortune 500 companies. This thesis addresses the literature gap by critically analyzing how major companies use LGBTQ+ activism as a social media marketing tactic. A critical discourse analysis was conducted on 90 Instagram posts from consumer-facing Fortune 500 companies with 750,000 followers or more. The findings demonstrated that two strategies were used to communicate with LGBTQ+ audiences: brand-focused appeals and person-focused appeals. Brand-focused appeals, employed by 66% of companies in the sample, used images of company products and logos, and promotional language. Person-focused appeals, utilized by 34% of companies, used images of LGBTQ+ people as the main subject of the post and discourse that highlighted the queer experience. Person-focused appeals were found to be more authentic but still lacking in inclusiveness and normalization. These results suggest that communications practitioners invested in successfully communicating with LGBTQ+ audiences should use person-focused appeals year-round that highlight the true diversity of the LGBTQ+ community.