Self presentation of public relations employees in social networks

Self-presentation, which is a situation that a person reveals about himself/herself in daily life and/or observes in the people around him/her, is an important issue integrated with a certain perception and opinion formation approach in interpersonal communication in many fields, especially public relations. The concept of self, which basically means the whole of the beliefs about oneself based on the evaluations of the person about himself/herself, and which constitutes the basis for the phenomenon of self-respect, has a key position in psychology and has been studied in many interdisciplinary studies in terms of its direct or indirect effect. When we look at the studies on how self-presentation is in the focus of a professional group, it is seen that the association of self-presentation with social media, which provides a free environment for individuals in the context of communication and self-expression thanks to the developing internet technology, is made for some professions, but there are no studies on public relations employees. In this context, in this study, which was carried out with the focus of the public relations profession, it was aimed to determine what kind of self-presentation public relations employees make through social networks in terms of self-presentation behavior, what kind of communication they make, and what kind of approach they take in terms of the way they represent their profession while sharing. The study was conducted with interviews based on open-ended answers, using an in-depth interview form containing sixty questions under twenty-one headings, with a total of eighteen participants, five of whom were managers and thirteen agency employees, from three public relations agencies that are members of TUHID (Turkish Public Relations Association) and two that are not. While the speech of each interviewer was examined within the scope of five main themes detailed with twenty-eight thematic topics, including all the questions in the interview form, which formed the general framework of the thesis, the photos shared by the participants on their own social networks were evaluated with content analysis in the presence of Instagram shares. According to the research findings, it has been determined that public relations employees use social networks effectively by sharing about their work and themselves, and it has been observed that they share their personal preferences, accompanied by images and photographs, and also act in a way to reveal their professional presence in addition to sharing for the construction of individual identity. As a result of the research, it has been evaluated that the added value provided to the public relations profession by web-based social networks, which stand out as a new dimension in communication, is in a very important position in terms of realizing the importance of the profession and understanding its sectoral nature correctly.