From Digital Footprints to Facts: Mining Marketing Policies of the Greek Community on Instagram and Youtube

Social media have conquered the widest spectrum of our lives. Companies, following the phenomena of the new digital era, are giving up traditional practices and use new policies of diffusion for advertising products and for engaging potential customers. In the context of ENIRISST+ (https://enirisst-plus.gr ), we started investigating whether transportation businesses (i.e., ferry companies, airlines, etc.) use the new era practices for promoting their products and services and then, extended our research on all kind of businesses. The work presented in this paper studies this shift for the Greek Instagram and YouTube community, records and analyses the activity of prominent Greek companies on social media, and measures the social and commercial impact of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 on Greek users' digital behaviour. Subsequently, we use the acquired data and analysis (i) to draw conclusions about the digital behaviour and preferences of the Greek social media scene and (ii) to compare the results in marketing policies and behavioural patterns on two inherently different social media platforms. This is the first study in the literature to perform an analysis on the behaviour of the Greek community in different social media.