How Are Social Influencers Connected in Instagram?

Due to the rapid growth of online social media, social influencers have attracted a great attention as new marketing channels. Brands such as NIKE or Starbucks try to advertise their products through social influencers who have expertise in specific areas and have a large number of followers with similar interests. In this paper, we analyze social relationships and interactions among influencers in Instagram. To investigate how social influencers manage social relationships with other influencers and how they share common followers, we conduct a measurement study on Instagram, and analyze the 218 social influencers who are followed by 8.9 M Instagram users. We find that influencers tend to have a large number of followers who are potential customers of brands, make reciprocal relationships with other influencers, and share common followers with other influencers. We also reveal that influencers who are connected each other tend to share common followers. We believe our work can provide an important insight for brands who would like to effectively hire a set of influencers and maximize their advertising effect.This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP; Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning) (No. NRF-2017R1C1B5018199)