Identifying target audiences on social network sites by analyisng user connections : a social network analysis approach for instagram

• Autor(a) principal: Schmidt, Tina
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/22744
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Social Network Sites offer users and brands a platform to interact by following each other and liking, commenting and sharing of content. This dissertation demonstrates that brands can leverage on rich data emerging from user-user-, user-brand-, and brand-brand-connections on Instagram to identify, understand and target new prospects. The concept of homophily suggests that users are mainly connected to other users they perceive as similar to themselves and to brands they identify with. Taking these insights into account, this dissertation aims to develop an audience selection approach to identify prospects that are likely to be interest in following a focal brand on Instagram. By extracting real network data from Instagram, users were segmented based on their “follow-relationship” to a set of exemplar brands that share a similar image with the focal brand. Four segments were identified and profiled: True-Brand-Lovers, Fashion Seeker, Hidden Treasures and Intangibles. Additionally, by taking secondary layer effects into account, a targeting experiment was conducted on Instagram to examine whether and to what extent resulted segments can be employed to find highly interested prospects. Findings disclosed that new prospects can especially be found by detecting overlapping followers between brands within the set. Moreover, tendencies were found that new prospects can be detected in the secondary layer of existing followers, especially when their connection to the set is taken into account as well. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that taking users affinity to other entities to account can help brands to define more precisely targeting decisions.