Toward Effective Social Contagion: A Micro Level Analysis of the Impact of Dyadic Network Relationship

Social advertising holds the potential to reshape the traditional advertising industry. Understanding what leads to effective social contagion at the dyadic level lies at the core of cost-effective social advertising strategies. This paper is the first attempt to comprehensively study the effect of dyadic network relationship on social contagion in directed networks. This paper reveals several intriguing findings of great importance to social media marketers: (1) reciprocal followers of adopters are less likely to be influenced than non-reciprocal followers, as moderated by the popularity and novelty of information; (2) social media users pay attention to their followers’ tastes while making the adoption decision; (3) the number of common mutual followers has opposite effects on the dyadic influence between reciprocal (positive) and non-reciprocal (negative) ties. In addition, this paper provides a novel model to identify social influence when adoption events are caused by multiple sources.