Comunicação institucional do IFBA no Instagram : análise de estratégias de marketing voltadas ao engajamento da Geração Z

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the institutional marketing strategies of the Instituto Federal da Bahia (IFBA) on Instagram and the engagement preferences of Generation Z, seeking to understand how institutional digital communication dialogues with the expectations and behaviors of students born between 1996 and 2012. The study took place in a context of digital transformation that redefines communication in the educational sector, where public institutions face the challenge of communicating effectively with young people who demand authenticity, accessible language, and coherent institutional positioning on social media. The specific objectives were to identify Generation Z's engagement preferences regarding institutional Instagram content; to describe the institutional marketing strategies implemented by IFBA on its Instagram profile; and to compare institutional strategies with Generation Z's preferences in order to identify points of convergence and divergence.The methodology was qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive, configured as a case study combining content analysis of 24 publications from IFBA's official profiles between May and October 2025, grounded in Bardin (2016), with 31 semi-structured interviews with Generation Z followers, analyzed through Orlandi's (2020) discursive perspective. The methodological triangulation between interviews and post analysis allowed for the empirical validation of participants' stated perceptions. The analytical organization departed from four theoretically defined a priori categories: cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement, grounded in Hollebeek et al. (2014), and social engagement, based on Bowden and Mirzaei (2021). These categories structured the interview guide and oriented the initial data analysis. Throughout the empirical material exploration, seven additional categories emerged directly from participants' accounts, not previously anticipated by the literature: the captation paradox, anchorless navigation, frozen communication, the authenticity paradox, graduation invisibilization, digital atomization, and institutional affective neutrality.The results revealed a structural misalignment between institutional strategies and the expectations of the young audience, organized into seven themes: the captation paradox, showing that 23 of the 31 participants discovered the profile only after enrollment; anchorless navigation, with 19 participants reporting a superficial consumption pattern summarized in the expression “I just scroll through”; frozen communication, perceived as an “archaic” model reminiscent of a “2000s public agency”; the authenticity paradox, demonstrating that posts featuring student protagonism achieved significantly higher engagement than formal ones; graduation invisibilization, with zero posts about higher education in the analyzed corpus; digital atomization, expressed through the phrase “every one for themselves” by 27 of the 31 participants; and affective neutrality, with 24 participants reporting never having experienced a positive emotional moment related to the publications. The contributions span theoretical, methodological, practical, and social dimensions, offering transferable guidelines for the Federal Network of Professional and Technological Education. It is concluded that IFBA's communicational challenge lies in the persistence of a model that privileges institutional control of the message over communicational co-authorship with students, demanding a strategic repositioning that recognizes young people as co-authors of institutional communication.