A diffusion mechanism for social advertising over microblogs

a r t i c l e i n f o Social media have increasingly become popular platforms for information dissemination. Recently, companies have attempted to take advantage of social advertising to deliver their advertisements to appropriate customers. The success of message propagation in social media depends greatly on the content relevance and the closeness of social relationships. In this paper, considering the factors of user preference, network influence , and propagation capability, we propose a diffusion mechanism to deliver advertising information over microblogging media. Our experimental results show that the proposed model could provide advertisers with suitable targets for diffusing advertisements continuously and thus efficiently enhance advertising effectiveness. In recent years, social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Plurk, have flourished and raised much attention. Social media provide users with an excellent platform to share and receive information and give marketers a great opportunity to diffuse information through numerous populations. An overwhelming majority of mar-keters are using social media to market their businesses, and a significant 81% of these marketers indicate that their efforts in social media have generated effective exposure for their businesses [59]. With effective vehicles for understanding customer behavior and new hybrid elements of the promotion mix, social media allow enterprises to make timely contact with the end-consumer at relatively low cost and higher levels of efficiency [52]. Since the World Wide Web (Web) is now the primary message delivering medium between advertisers and consumers, it is a critical issue to find the best way to utilize on-line media for advertising purposes [18,29]. The effectiveness of advertisement distribution highly relies on well understanding the preference information of the targeted users. However, some implicit personal information of users, particularly the new users, may not be always obtainable to the marketers [23]. As users know more about their friends than marketers, the relations between the users become a natural medium and filter for message diffusion. Moreover, most people are willing to share their information with friends and are likely to be affected by the opinions of their friends [35,45]. Social advertising is a kind of recommendation system, of sharing information between friends. It takes advantage of the relation of users to conduct an advertising campaign. In 2010, eMarketer reported that 90% of consumers rely on recommendations from people they trust. In the same time, IDG Amplify indicated that the efficiency of social advertising is greater than the traditional …