  Social Honeypots are tools deployed in Online Social Networks (OSN) to
attract malevolent activities performed by spammers and bots. To this end,
their content is designed to be of maximum interest to malicious users.
However, by choosing an appropriate content topic, this attractive mechanism
could be extended to any OSN users, rather than only luring malicious actors.
As a result, honeypots can be used to attract individuals interested in a wide
range of topics, from sports and hobbies to more sensitive subjects like
political views and conspiracies. With all these individuals gathered in one
place, honeypot owners can conduct many analyses, from social to marketing
studies.
  In this work, we introduce a novel concept of social honeypot for attracting
OSN users interested in a generic target topic. We propose a framework based on
fully-automated content generation strategies and engagement plans to mimic
legit Instagram pages. To validate our framework, we created 21 self-managed
social honeypots (i.e., pages) on Instagram, covering three topics, four
content generation strategies, and three engaging plans. In nine weeks, our
honeypots gathered a total of 753 followers, 5387 comments, and 15739 likes.
These results demonstrate the validity of our approach, and through statistical
analysis, we examine the characteristics of effective social honeypots.
