Visual Social Media Usage and Human Branding Approaches by Peloton Instructors

Visual social media content has grown in importance across the social media landscape, and sports social media has seen significant growth in athletes, teams, and other professionals utilizing Instagram, TikTok, and other visually oriented networks to build their brands and interact with audiences. Within the population of sports-related influencers, visual social media content can act as an important tool in the development and extension of the human brand, where celebrities form relationships with audiences through factors of autonomy, relatedness, and competence (Thomson, 2006). This chapter connects human brand-building efforts with the utilization of social media through a qualitative thematic analysis of the visual social media content produced by Peloton fitness instructors. The analysis revealed that instructors had well-defined themes of community-building, support, humor, and competence, and engaged in both individual brand-building and branding connected to the parent Peloton company.