Social Media Posts Popularity Prediction During Long-Running Live Events A case study on Fashion Week
In the last few years, social media has dominated various aspects of people’s life including social events. Users participate more and more in long-running periodical events in social media, by sharing their experiences and preferences. This information provides unprecedented opportunities allowing businesses to promote their brands coverage by using word-of-mouth (WOM), that is enabled by the user generated contents (UGCs). Studying social media content popularity by considering the societies’ behavioral patterns is, therefore, paramount. In this thesis, we inspect users’ engagement motives in long-running events by means of a comprehensive statistical analysis of fashion week events on Instagram. Additionally, we develop a multi-modal approach to solve the problem of post popularity prediction that exploits potentially influential factors and apply it on fashion week events. We employ two metrics for implementing a filter feature selection technique, together with an automated grid search for optimizing hyper-parameters in four regression methods: ridge, support vector regressor, gradient tree boosting and neural networks.