Predicting Social Media Engagement using Machine Learning

Social media platforms are popular channels for disseminating information, owing to their large user bases and ease of access. Companies also use social media as an important aspect of the advertising process. By creating high-quality posts, companies can strengthen their engagement metrics and increase their follower count. While a growing body of research has examined social media engagement, fewer studies have jointly examined the visual, textual, and temporal features of image posts, even though these features collectively determine the performance of content on social media. To understand the important drivers of social media engagement, we collect image posts of furniture firms on Facebook and extract visual, temporal, and textual features from them using text and image analytics methods. We evaluate several machine learning models--including Random Forest, Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)--to assess the drivers and the prediction power of social media engagement using the features from our data. Our primary model, LightGBM, explains 81.8% of the variance in the engagement score, 2.3 times that of our baseline model. We observed that brand-relative deviation features, which capture how far a post departs from its brand's norms, are the strongest predictors, accounting for 51.3% of total importance. Our research quantifies the extent to which these features are associated with interactions and provides recommendations that organizations may consider.