Co-constructing a participatory brand: The affordances of live streaming for social media entrepreneurship

Abstract

Creative workers in the social media industries face the relentless imperative to present themselves as media entrepreneurs, marketing their “brand” to external audiences, followers, and potential customers. This study challenges the notion of “self-branding” (Marwick, 2013; Duffy, 2017) and suggests that, on social live streaming platforms, content creators engage in a joint branding effort with their audiences which I term participatory branding. Participatory branding redistributes the labor of personal branding on social media and emphasizes the work of audiences in helping to shape the brand of a social media entrepreneur. Drawing on an affordances approach, I then propose a typology of personal branding on social media that maps the terrain of other platforms as it relates to design, cross-platform promotion, and audience activity in content creation.