SOCIO-PRAGMATIC STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURIAL LANGUAGE IN SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Abstract

One cannot rule out the fact that the world has entered in the phase of global village. The social media is a formidable bridge connecting people of all works and space into a community of equality. Entrepreneurs have maximized the advertising space opportunity offered by social media to sell their goods and services. The innovative window opened through social media has made a conspicuous paradigm shift from the physical market to virtual market for enrepreneurs. The objective of this study is to investigate the rhetorics of social media entrepreneurs to determine how their choice of words, as it relates to their social environment affect their target audience; in other word, how they were used to persuade their target audience of their products. Aristotelian Rhetoric is employed to guide the study. This study made use of both primary and secondary data. For the primary data, 22 short videos from Facebook were randomly selected, and; descriptive analysis carried out to draw inferences on them.