Social Media and Body Language in Arda Güler's Journey to Real Madrid: Going Beyond Performance with Communication Strategies

framework of Instagram, a social media platform, and to analyze the body language used in the shared photographs of Arda Güler. The reason why Arda Güler was chosen as the scope of the research is that the transfer news had a great impact in both national and international media. In the research, document analysis technique, which is a descriptive method from qualitative research methods, was used and content analysis was used to analyze the documents. Within the scope of the purpose of the research, the photo posts of Real Madrid Sports Club (n = 31) and Arda Güler (n = 5) on their official Instagram accounts between 6-15 July 2023 were examined. The research took place in three stages. In the first stage, national and international literature review was conducted in order to create a conceptual framework on the subject. In the second stage, information about the posts and Instagram accounts of Arda Güler and Real Madrid Sports Club within the specified date range was tried to be revealed with a descriptive method. In the third stage, Arda Güler's body language was examined in both Instagram accounts and the obtained data was tabulated. While determining the body language categories used in the research, In accordance with the purpose of the research, subcategories were created in 3 different body language categories, and this study was conducted taking into account the body language categories created by Doğan (2020). Accordingly, facial expressions, hand/arm/finger movements, body posture categories are divided into subcategories according to Arda Güler's body language reflections. The validity and reliability study of the research was conducted according to the credibility criteria developed by Guba and Lincoln (1982). It is thought that the results obtained from this study will contribute to the field in terms of revealing the importance of body language in communication as well as social media visibility.