Metadiscourse in online advertising: Exploring linguistic and visual metadiscourse in social media advertisements

Advertising is a powerful means of flowing information from sellers to buyers and it highly influences and smartly persuades people to do actions. This paper investigates the frequency and the use of the linguistic and the visual metadiscourse markers in SM advertisements, in addition to the role they play in the construction of persuasion. A corpus of 50 advertisements was extracted from three SM platforms: Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, and both frequency-based and qualitative methods were integrated in the analysis. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005a, 2005b) models of metadiscourse and Kumpf's visual metadiscourse (2000), the study compared the use of these two distinct types of metadiscourse, and explained how visual metadiscourse complements linguistic metadiscourse in constructing persuasive messages and enticing customers into buying products. Results revealed that all categories of visual metadiscourse, especially chunking, convention, and consistency, were highly evident in the data investigated. Results also showed that engagement markers and directives exhibited higher frequencies than other linguistic metadiscourse and they were employed as effective techniques of persuasive language. The study concluded that metadiscourse, both visually and linguistically, plays a vital role in structuring the discourse, engaging the audience, and catching the consumers’ interest, thus becoming an integral aspect of persuasive writing. • The use of linguistic and visual metadiscourse in online advertising was examined. • Both verbal and visual metadiscourse play a role in the construction of persuasion. • Persuasiveness of the advertisements is achieved by the use of engagement markers. • Visual devices constitute meaning and help the reader get the desired message. • Advertising is a hybrid communicative process based on textual and visual elements.