Cultivating Social Media Utilization by Television Stations: An Analysis of Instagram Practices in Czech Republic

In this study, the utilization of social media platforms was investigated out of three well-known Czech television stations using daily-based data on the Instagram official accounts of the stations, which involves a lengthy sample period from July 2021 to August 2022. The main contribution of this paper is that the study is a novel examination of Czech Republic television stations on the popular image-sharing social media while taking into account trend and entertainment conditions, and their presentability over different content and messages. The results indicate that several content strategy patterns such as how snapshots of TV program sets can produce a significant positive engagement from fans of the programs over certain parts of the shows. In addition, the results show that none of the content posted on the accounts which were examined contained a low-quality image. However, without considering trends and entertainment conditions, this study finds that social media is another media over digital spaces that has superior benefits if it is applied as an extension media for the television industry. The robustness of our results is confirmed based on qualitative analysis and several television stations samples. The findings of this study are beneficial for the social media practitioners engaged in the practice of diverse social media.