Engagement Analysis on Local Small-Medium Enterprises: Case Study in Bandung

Abstract

Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) do not have the resources to carry out large-scale promotions. SMEs can use social media to build brands and promote their products to the wider community using social media. Engagement between SMEs and their followers in social media is considered important for evaluating SMEs’ performance as indicated by the interaction such as the number of responses or reactions to published posts. This paper aims to conduct an analysis of one of the followers’ interactions (number of likes) on different types of SME posts; branding, promotion, and testimonial. We do the analysis of Instagram posts by SMEs in the culinary sector located in Bandung. Their posts and their followers’ interactions are collected and analyzed using time series visualization to understand the dynamic of follower interactions towards the posts. Additionally, we use predictive analysis to figure out the number of expected interactions on the specific type of posts using linear regression. Our prediction model gives fairly low error values (mean absolute error-MAE = 6.524 and root mean square error-RMSE: 9.780) and a good R-squared value of 0.783. An interesting insight from the prediction results suggested that testimonial posts will draw more interaction compared to promotion posts.