Controlling Social Media Data: a Case Study of the Effect of Social Presence on Consumers’ Engagement with Brand-generated Instagram Posts

Research in social media marketing studies ways to increase customers’ engagement with brand-generated social media posts. This can either be done through experiments, or corpus studies of existing social media posts. Experiments have the advantage that they are controlled, but they often lack ecological validity, while for corpus studies the reverse is often true. As a case study, we construct a corpus of 1761 brand-generated Instagram posts, looking at the effect of social presence (the perception of human contact) on different engagement metrics (likes and comments), taking the effect of possible confounds (theme of slogans, funniness, time) into account. We show how social media posts can be analyzed at different levels of granularity, to establish the strength of the effect of social presence. We hope that our work will help others to isolate the impact of different variables on post engagement on social media.