Influencer: Empowering Everyday Users in Creating Promotional Posts via AI-infused Exploration and Customization

Creating promotional posts on social platforms enables everyday users to disseminate their creative outcomes, engage in community exchanges, or generate additional income from micro-businesses. However, crafting eye-catching posts with appealing images and effective captions can be challenging and time-consuming for everyday users since they are mostly design novices. We propose Influencer, an interactive tool that helps novice creators quickly generate ideas and create high-quality promotional post designs through AI. Influencer offers a multi-dimensional recommendation system for ideation through example-based image and caption suggestions. Further, Influencer implements a holistic promotional post-design system supporting context-aware exploration considering brand messages and user-specified design constraints, flexible fusion of content, and a mind-map-like layout for idea tracking. Our user study, comparing the system with industry-standard tools, along with two real-life case studies, indicates that Influencer is effective in assisting design novices to generate ideas as well as creative and diverse promotional posts with user-friendly interaction.