Instagram and Lifestyle Change: A Case Study of Sadafbeauty

The purpose of this study is to analyse “Sadaf Beauty” webpage, which is a leading Instagram Pages in the area of “beauty” according to Forbes Magazine. The main research questions was how Sadaf's lifestyle is displayed to her audiences? This study conducted based on quantitative content analysis. The unit of the analysis was “stories”. The coding protocol was validated by two experts in the field of communication. In terms of the reliability, the test and re-test mechanism was carried out. The results of the Kappa tests were 0.7 and above, which showed the results are valid and reliable. The most important findings of the study are as below: Most Sadaf's stories were devoted to “informative” and “entertaining” contents; Most of her storylines were about travel and personal experiences; she generally advertises products or services that she has used and been satisfied with. In most cases, Sadaf had a positive and favorable orientation; the major type of communication that she used with the audiences was often “sincere and polite”. And apparently during these 20 days, Sadaf never mentioned any political issues, especially in relation to Iran and its cultural and religious issues. Based on the results of study, this article concludes that “Sadaf” is trying to influence the life styles of the audiences through demonstrating her personal life-style and also using some soft communication skills (such as “sincere and polite” communication etc.). This conclusion is mainly in line with some of the key findings and assumptions of previous studies and theories.