Presentation of celebrities’ private life through visual social media

Alongside the impressions they make from their professional careers, many celebrities have started to present themselves in seemingly private moments and create content that not only focuses on themselves but also on friends and family members. Against this background, we investigated how celebrities sharing their private moments affects their popularity, a key metric in influencer marketing. We analyzed both visual and textual data from a sample of 1,437 celebrities with more than 350,000 posts on Instagram. The results showed an inverted U-shape relationship between sharing private (vs professional) content and social media popularity, with celebrities sharing less private content than would be optimal on average. A subsequent experiment confirmed this finding. While most celebrities increasingly share their professional content over the course of their career, we show that this may indeed have a negative effect on popularity. Furthermore, self-presentation with a high degree of self-focus helps celebrities to grow popularity.