Analyzing Factors Influencing Personal Branding of Active Musicians by Data Mining: A Case Study of Instagram

Objective Personal branding is an emerging area in the field of branding, where individuals can build a lasting personal brand by aligning their goals with effective strategies. Given the profound need for research in personal branding as well as the significant role of social networks in this process, this study aims to explore the factors influencing the personal branding of active musicians through a data mining approach on Instagram. Methodology The research targets individuals who have established themselves as brands in specialized and scientific fields on Instagram, including experts and musicians. For this study, 10 prominent musicians on Instagram were selected for analysis. In total, 10 personal Instagram pages of musicians were analyzed. The sampling method used was judgment sampling, and the database consisted of an Excel file containing 1,150 records. According to previous studies and expert opinions, data were examined from these personal pages over one year, from December 1, 2019, to December 1, 2020, during which 1,150 Instagram posts were analyzed. The number of comments and likes is identified as a key factor in the development of the personal brand of the studied individuals, reflecting the level of awareness and interaction with the personal brand. Consequently, the study examines the effect of 11 different features on the likes and comments of the posts. After data collection, Naim software was used for data analysis and data mining operations, and the decision tree model was extracted, accordingly. Findings The decision tree analysis reveals that factors such as post type, content, context, tags, and hashtags in Persian and English, as well as the month and day of publication, significantly impact user engagement and personal brand awareness. In this study, user engagement on Instagram is measured by likes and comments, which lead to brand awareness. The findings identified eleven input features—followers, post type, post content, context, caption, tags, English hashtags, Persian hashtags, total hashtags, day of post, and month of post—that influence comments and likes. These findings provide musicians with insights into the factors influencing their brand on Instagram, allowing them to effectively manage, develop, and enhance their personal brands. This, in turn, can lead to increased user engagement and greater audience awareness. Conclusion The results indicate that musicians can improve their performance on Instagram by focusing on specific factors that influence their personal brands. Image posts receive the most likes, while videos garner the most comments i.e. to increase audience engagement and brand awareness, musicians should prioritize posting images and videos. Posts featuring personal content, memories, entertainment, and non-concert performances attract the most likes. It is recommended that non-concert performance posts feature movie-style backgrounds to boost likes and comments.