Using Social Media for Word-of-Mouth Marketing
This work addresses the need for more effective and cost-efficient marketing strategies for businesses using social media, though it appears incremental by applying existing concepts to a specific platform.
The paper tackles the problem of under-utilized word-of-mouth marketing in social networks by identifying authoritative users to promote products, and it demonstrates this approach on a Facebook group dataset with 0.3 million messages and 10 million user reactions.
Nowadays online social networks are used extensively for personal and commercial purposes. This widespread popularity makes them an ideal platform for advertisements. Social media can be used for both direct and word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing. Although WoM marketing is considered more effective and it requires less advertisement cost, it is currently being under-utilized. To do WoM marketing, we need to identify a set of people who can use their authoritative position in social network to promote a given product. In this paper, we show how to do WoM marketing in Facebook group, which is a question answer type of social network. We also present concept of reinforced WoM marketing, where multiple authorities can together promote a product to increase the effectiveness of marketing. We perform our experiments on Facebook group dataset consisting of 0.3 million messages and 10 million user reactions.