The motives of Egyptian journalists behind building their personal and professional identities on social media platforms

The study aimed to uncover the personal and professional motives of a sample of journalists working in several Egyptian newspapers behind launching their accounts on social media platforms. Additionally, It investigated the extent of the relationship of these accounts to the process of identity building and self-marketing, and the role that press institutions play in this process. The researcher relied on a number of theoretical approaches related to the topic of the study, on top of which are the two approaches of self-marketing and uses and gratifications, by highlighting the role that social networking sites play, as one of the tributaries of new media, in self-marketing and building identity for journalists.
The study adopted a model of motives for building the self-identity and was based on two main classifications: personal motives and professional motives. Within each of these two classifications, there were three levels, individual, organizational, and institutional.
 The study relied on collecting its material on the two standardized interview tools through a set of questions that were designed through the Google FORMS service and sent to the accounts of 109 journalists on Facebook and WhatsApp.
The researcher also conducted telephone interviews with 7 press leaders in several newspapers and websites, aiming to find out more in-depth details and information.
The study concluded with several results, the most important of which is that journalists practice the function of marketing on social media platforms, but at the individual level concerned with marketing journalists for themselves and their journalistic product in the first place. Moreover, the results also showed that the concept of building identity through social media platforms is unclear in its professional form among some journalists since they only employed these platforms as a source of information that enabled them to follow the accounts of their newspapers or sources. These results revealed that the Egyptian press institutions are not aware of the importance of employing the personal accounts for their journalists in promoting and marketing the institution, and in this context, they are satisfied with their official accounts.