Improving social media engagements on paid and non-paid advertisements: a data mining approach

: The purpose of this research is to develop a strategy to improve the number of social media engagement on Facebook both for paid and non-paid publications through a data mining approach. Several Facebook post characteristics were weighted in order to rank the input variables importance. Three machine learning algorithms performance along with dynamic parameters were compared in order to obtain a robust algorithm in assessing the importance of several input factors. Random forest is found as the most powerful algorithm with 79% accuracy and therefore used to analyse the importance of input factors in order to improve the number of engagements of social media posts. Eventually, total page likes (number of page follower) of a company Facebook page are found as the most important factor in order to have more social media engagements both for paid and non-paid publications. We also propose a managerial implication on how to improve the number of engagements in company social media.