Catching Social Media Advertisers with Strategy Analysis

Advertisers worldwide spent $24 billion to reach consumers on social media in 2015. While such a new way of advertising has successfully turn the social media into generous profits, the strategies behind it is still mystery to users, advertisers and many businesses. In this paper, we uncover the underlying mechanisms of the social media advertising. Specifically, we compare them with the old-school advertising strategies that have been widely used since the early 1900s. The advertising on the high tech does not achieve beyond the wisdom of the elders but run faster at a unprecedented scale. We define a series of novel features from the strategies we discover. We further propose a classification method called SocAdDet based on the SVMs. Experiments on a real social dataset show that SocAdDet can accurately identify different advertising strategies and detect the social promoters. The high accuracy demonstrates that the social media advertising is stronger but not smarter.