Social media has become an important tool in marketing for companies to communicate with their consumers. Firms post content and consumers express their appreciation for the brand by following them on social media and/or by liking the firm generated content. Understanding the consumers' attitudes towards a particular brand on social media (i.e. liking) is important. In this paper, we focus on a method for brand popularity prediction and use it to analyze social media posts generated by various brands during a specific period of time. Existing instance-based popularity prediction methods focus on popularity of images, text, and individual posts. We propose a new category based popularity prediction method by incorporating the spatio-temporal dimension in the representation. In particular, we focus on brands as a specific category. We study the behavior of our method by performing four experiments on a collection of brand posts crawled from Instagram with 150,000 posts related to 430 active brands. Our experiments establish that 1) we are able to accurately predict the popularity of posts generated by brands, 2) we can use this post-level trained model to predict the popularity of a brand, 3) by constructing category representations we are improving the accuracy of brand popularity prediction, and 4) using our proposal we are able to select a set of images for each brand with high potential of becoming popular.

Brand-related user posts on social networks are growing at a staggering rate, where users express their opinions about brands by sharing multimodal posts. However, while some posts become popular, others are ignored. In this paper, we present an approach for identifying what aspects of posts determine their popularity. We hypothesize that brand-related posts may be popular due to several cues related to factual information, sentiment, vividness and entertainment parameters about the brand. We call the ensemble of cues engagement parameters. In our approach, we propose to use these parameters for predicting brand-related user post popularity. Experiments on a collection of fast food brand-related user posts crawled from Instagram show that: visual and textual features are complementary in predicting the popularity of a post; predicting popularity using our proposed engagement parameters is more accurate than predicting popularity directly from visual and textual features; and our proposed approach makes it possible to understand what drives post popularity in general as well as isolate the brand specific drivers.