Youtube creators and communities, the new faces of social media marketing: A research on the videos made by youtubers in collaboration with brands

With the changes in technology and the development of social media, the spheres of influence of consumers has expanded. Today, the idea that consumers share on social media platforms can easily reach massive mass. The user-generated content power makes it difficult for brands to communicate effectively with target groups as they exist only on social media platforms. Collaboration videos, created with popular YouTube content producers with the capacity to influence their channel communities, help naturally and effectively communicate with the brand's target audiences. The collaborate videos which main purpose is connect with the content producer's channel community to can be successful is possible through a strategic approach. The purpose of the study is to examine the reactions of the channel communities against collaboration videos to block strategic mistakes in the collaborative videos co-produced with brands and YouTube content producers. The first part of the thesis deals with the concept of social media in general and the difference from traditional marketing of social media marketing. The second section describes YouTube's place in social media marketing, YouTube content producers and channel communities in the context of Hovland's message learning thesis, and videos of YouTuber - brand collaboration. In the last part, the reactions of the channel communties towards the campaign of "Denemeye Var Mısın?" prepared by the Avon brand with the make-up vloggers Melodi Elbirliler, Tuğba Tunçkaya and Cansu Akın have been examined. A total of 2942 comments in collaboration videos were analyzed within the context of a qualitative research design netnography. As a result of analysis, it has been determined that each content producer has a channel communities consisting of different groups and the channel communities have different responses to the collaboration videos according to group characteristics of channel communities.