Measuring social media influencer index- insights from facebook, Twitter and Instagram

The growth of social media has completely revamped the way people interact, communicate and engage. These platforms play a key role in facilitating greater outreach and influence. This study proposes a mechanism for measuring the influencer index across popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A set of features that determine the impact on the consumers are modelled using a regression approach. The underlying machine learning algorithms including Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), K-NN Regression (KNN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Lasso Regression models are adapted to compute a cumulative score in terms of influencer index. Findings indicate that engagement, outreach, sentiment, and growth play a key role in determining the influencers. Further, the ensemble of the four models resulted in the highest accuracy of 93.7% followed by the KNN regression with 93.6%. The study has implications across various domains of e-commerce, viral marketing, social media marketing and brand management wherein identification of key information propagators is essential. These influencer indices may further be utilized by e-commerce portals and brands for the purpose of social media promotion and engagement for larger outreach.