Network-based prediction for social marketing on Instagram

Dash Hudson is a consulting business for companies that wish to optimize their Instagram marketing strategies.They collect and store information about Instagram user activity around their client's brand, and provide astreamlined platform that allows the marketing strategists to access and interpret this data. Its platform guidescompanies to identify and evaluate the most important influencers, i.e. users with highest impact in thediffusion of the ads of the company. Dash Hudson is looking to develop efficient algorithms for data analysis inorder to enhance the targeted recommendations presented to their clients. In particular, they need to improvethe identification of high-impact influencers.Our research team, with its expertise in networks, will help Dash Hudson with this problem. Working jointlywith Dash Hudson, we will analyze the information they gather, and develop algorithms which will refine therecommendations provided to companies marketing their products on Instagram. One of the technologicalchallenges of the project is that the full information is not available. Ideally, one has the complete Instagramsocial network information available in order to develop good marketing strategies. However, collectinginformation for all users is expensive in terms of time and resources. The first phase of our project is to predictand compensate the lack of information presented in the network structure.Once we have obtained the network information, we will use the latest techniques in link mining and modeling.Our methods will help to identify different contexts and levels of influence. In addition, it will be possible toidentify users with high potential at an early stage, without having to rely only on a long history of past success.This will improve the recommendations that Dash Hudson provides to its clients.