What Is Media Strategy 3: Intensive Use Of Social Media?

Media Strategy 3: Intensive use of social media One of the most successful media that ISIS used in propagating their ideology amongst youth and the international community are by using social media. In the late 2000s until today, we can see the rise of social media amongst the world population as this social media evolve in connecting one user to the other in a more interactive way. Twitter and Facebook are the two examples of the most highly used social media. Strategically, ISIS manage to use best of social media to connect with an enormous number of its targeted followers and influence them with its ideology whether by depicting the radical ideology or the nation-building ideology to reach different groups (Siboni

However, they do not have a focus niche of its targeted supporters, their media output productions were commonly for general viewer; domestic-male-Muslim-adult-friendly (Jabareen 2014: 53), and not being attractive to the other demographic of people such as non-middle-east citizens, women, less-or-non-practice Muslim and youth. In fact, to join these older armed group, they have certain criteria to be met such as “have some knowledge of Salafi Islam, a certain level of physical fitness and some military potential (Kilkullen 2015: 72)” and many more which makes these groups only appeal to some niche of demographic. In contrast, ISIS media strategy is an evolution of these groups media strategy. ISIS uses social media to reach different demographic of people and have less strict criteria for anyone to join them accept one must be a Muslim (Kilkullen 2015: 72). Consequently, one of the highest demographic that are trying to join ISIS is young women, which is a shock for everyone (Kilkullen 2015: 71). Hence, the evolution is clear here, ISIS strategy in using social media is to reach wider different niche of people, while the older non-state armed generally target only certain group of