Text Analysis on Instagram Comments to Better Target Users with Product Advertisements

Abstract

Online advertising has been growing steadily over the years as more and more people connect to the internet. Advertising online can reach a large crowd which is both an advantage and disadvantage because a lot of people will see products they don’t want. Targeted online advertisements are gaining popularity because it only shows advertisements to people who might be interested in the product based on their preferences and online presence. But these targeted advertisements are still not enough to narrow down the users to sell products. There might be products that might not be needed by certain people at certain times thus reducing the effectiveness of the advertisement. The text analysis tool for Instagram is developed in order to narrow down the most repeated words of media posts based on the type of photo, the gender of who made the comment, and the time the comment was posted. These repeated words are then visualized using a word cloud and word histogram so that businesses can determine which and what products to advertise. A two-week advertising experiment was done wherein during the first week, a random product was advertised on Instagram while in the second week, the text analysis tool was used to determine which product to advertise. The number of sales slightly increased in week two compared to week 1 (18 items vs 16 items sold) while the number of customer inquiries dramatically increased from 92 in the first week to 157 on the second week.