Sponsored content and user engagement dynamics on Instagram

In this work, we analyze sponsored content and its impact on user engagement in the context of influencer marketing on Instagram. We collected and characterized a large-scale dataset of Instagram profiles and proposed metrics to capture the impact that advertisement posting strategies have on audience engagement over time. In particular, we analyze how the variation in the number of sponsored posts correlates with the number of likes and comments on a weekly basis. We show that an increasing amount of sponsored content can negatively affect audience engagement with an influencer's profile. Nevertheless, our analysis also suggests that there is a variety of ways to mitigate this negative effect, such as strategic usage of mentions and hashtags, the textual content of a sponsored post, as well as seasonal information.