Analyzing the Language Functions of Food Advertising Contents in Instagram Reels and TikTok Videos

The use of social media is on the rise every day. Various platforms have emerged with improved features, such as short-video content creation. Instagram and TikTok have been the top two social media platforms for video content sharing, which has opened opportunities for brands and companies marketing and advertising purposes. However, these platforms have different algorithms that influence different contents being spread out to the market. Therefore, this paper is written with three aims; to figure out the differences between Instagram and TikTok contents, the relationship between the videos and the captions and the language function to enhance the copywriting for captions. The data were taken from top 5 food products with a total of 15 videos being gathered and analyzed by using Holmes theory of language functions. The result showed that the advertisement videos in TikTok are more playful than those in Instagram. From the 10 videos, around 80% of the contents in both Instagram and TikTok are relevant to the videos .For Instagram, the most dominant language functions are directive, while for TikTok the directive and referential functions are leading. This research is expected to contribute to the marketing and advertising field for practitioners and researchers in gaining more insights on how to create content in both TikTok and Instagram.