Seeking Micro-influencers for Brand Promotion

What made you want to wear the clothes you are wearing? Where is the place you want to visit for your next-coming holiday? Why do you like the music you frequently listen to? If you are like most people, you probably made these decisions as a result of watching influencers on social media. Furthermore, influencer marketing is an opportunity for brands to take advantage of social media using a well-defined and well-designed social media marketing strategy. However, choosing the right influencers is not an easy task. With more people gaining an increasing number of followers in social media, finding the right influencer for an E-commerce company becomes paramount. In fact, most marketers cite it as a top challenge for their brands. To address the aforementioned issues, we proposed a data-driven micro-influencer ranking scheme to solve the essential question of finding out the right micro-influencer. Specifically, we represented brands and influencers by fusing their historical posts' visual and textual information. A novel k-buckets sampling strategy with a modified listwise learning to rank model were proposed to learn a brand-micro-influncer scoring function. In addition, we developed a new Instagram brand micro-influencer dataset, consisting of 360 brands and 3,748 micro-influencers, which can benefit future researchers in this area. The extensive evaluations demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art methods.