How Do Influencers Mention Brands in Social Media? Sponsorship Prediction of Instagram Posts

Brand mentioning is a type of word-of-mouth advertising method where a brand name is disclosed by social media users in posts. Recently, brand mentioning by influencers has raised great attention because of the strong viral effects on the huge fan base of influencers. In this paper, we study the brand mentioning practice of influencers. More specifically, we analyze a brand mentioning social network built on 18,523 Instagram influencers and 804,397 brand mentioning posts. As a result, we found four inspiring findings: (i) most influencers mention only a few brands in their posts; (ii) popular influencers tend to mention only popular brands while micro-influencers do not have a preference on brand popularity; (iii) audience have highly similar reactions to sponsored and non-sponsored posts; and (iv) compared to non-sponsored posts, sponsored brand mentioning posts favor fewer usertags and more hashtags with longer captions to exclusively promote the specific products. Moreover, we propose a neural network-based model to classify the sponsorship of posts utilizing network embedding and social media features. The experimental results show that our model achieves 80% accuracy and significantly outperforms baseline methods.