Swedish Armed Forces on Social Media : A study of Livgardet official Facebook page and 12:e motoriserade skyttebataljonen unofficial Facebook page.

Sammanfattning: The Swedish Armed Forces as a big public actor own different media channels and promote life as a soldier from different angles. They create marketing campaigns, which are available widely on YouTube or Facebook. The increased activity on social media platforms, especially Facebook, have created a field for research. There are multiple Facebook pages, from which one can acquire information regarding life at a given regiment. They can be divided into official and unofficial Facebook pages. The fascinating aspect of this division is how differently each of the Facebook pages approaches the audience and how differently they are shaping their strategic communication and reputation, despite owning officially issued guidelines on how the Swedish Armed Forces ought to be presented in the online world. Through multimodal analysis with a shift towards the systematic linguistic in the framework of Machin and Halliday, official Facebook page of Livgardet and unofficial Facebook page of 12:e motoriserade skyttebataljonen have been analyzed to see whether the messages that the Swedish Armed Forces are conveying are aligned. Adding netnography in the frame of Kozinets, the audience has been studied to inquire whether there is a different purpose of using the official and unofficial Facebook page.  The results of this study shows, that the unofficial Facebook page is coherent in a different way, they might not be following the strategic communication guidelines strictly, but they are coherent in their actions and posts, whereas the official Facebook page, which is strictly following the strategic communication guidelines and does not appear as coherent with their actions. At the same time, the audience is using the unofficial Facebook page reconnect with the memories they have from when they did their duty. On the other hand, the official Facebook page is used by the audience as a place to show their appreciation and pride in the Swedish Armed Forces.