The stock exchange of influencers: a financial approach for studying fanbase variation trends

Abstract

In many online social networks (OSNs), a limited portion of profiles emerges and reaches a large base of followers, i.e., the so-called social influencers. One of their main goals is to increase their fanbase to increase their visibility, engaging users through their content. In this work, we propose a novel parallel between the ecosystem of OSNs and the stock exchange market. Followers act as private investors, and they follow influencers, i.e., buy stocks, based on their individual preferences and on the information they gather through external sources. In this preliminary study, we show how the approaches proposed in the context of the stock exchange market can be successfully applied to social networks. Our case study focuses on 60 Italian Instagram influencers and shows how their followers short-term trends obtained through Bollinger bands become close to those found in external sources, Google Trends in our case, similarly to phenomena already observed in the financial market. Besides providing a strong correlation between these different trends, our results pose the basis for studying social networks with a new lens, linking them with a different domain.