Analysis of growth strategies in social media: The instagram use case

Social Networking describes the phenomena found in participatory and self-expressive Web sites-such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Online communities represent a growing class of marketplace communities where participants can provide and exchange information on products, services, or common interests. Exploiting the phenomena, companies, artists, and new professional figures as influencers, youtubers and resellers, are increasingly using online communities to create value for their firms and customers, ensuring that their activities are relevant to the social network audience. However, from a marketing perspective, being able to distinguish a brand or an original work in a sea of competitors is a difficult challenge. From a more economic perspective, having a social media plan and strategy in place is becoming a must. At the same time, from the technical perspective, becoming popular in those platforms it is not so easy. This paper presents a seminal effort to investigate some strategies to growth on Instagram without using promotion tools. In particular, we studied how 'Benign' Social Bots, using the provided platform APIs, can affect the Social Media world. Our experimental results assess and benchmark the effectiveness of some approaches, increasing the diffusion of users content on the Social Media and consequentially speeding up growth.