Abstract
In today’s visually driven digital culture, Instagram serves as a vital platform for brand communication, particularly within Africa’s mobile-first and youth-oriented media landscape. Telecommunications companies such as MTN and Airtel employ Instagram not only for marketing but also as a multimodal space for constructing identity, fostering relationships, and engaging audiences through interactive visuals. This study adopts a qualitative descriptive design grounded in Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar, which extends Halliday’s (1978) Systemic Functional Linguistics to visual communication. Focusing on the interactional and compositional metafunctions, the study examines how Nigerian telecommunication brands construct meaning and engage audiences through Instagram advertisements. Six posts (three from each brand), published between January and December 2024, were purposively selected based on visual richness, communicative clarity, and representativeness of each brand’s marketing style. Each post was analyzed as a multimodal text integrating visual and linguistic resources such as images, captions, emojis, hashtags, and embedded text. Data were interpreted through multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), emphasizing gaze, angle, distance, and modality for interactional meaning, and information value, salience, framing, and balance for compositional meaning. Findings reveal that MTN’s advertisements foreground energy, inclusivity, and empowerment through high-modality imagery and vibrant colour contrasts, while Airtel’s emphasize love, connection, and reliability through closer social distance and compositional symmetry. Across both brands, interactional and compositional resources transform visuals into dynamic social interactions that humanize technology, establish trust, and articulate cultural narratives of unity and hope in African digital media.
Keywords: Multimodality, Visual Grammar, Instagram Advertising, Brand Identity, Engagement
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/sojolics.2025.v01i01.022
author/Kenan, S. H., Umar, A. B., & Yusufu, W.
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 1(1) | June 2025 |
