Toward Information Diffusion Model for Viral Marketing in Business

Current obstacles in the study of social media marketing include dealing with massive data and real-time updates have motivated to contribute solutions that can be adopted for viral marketing. Since information diffusion and social networks are the core of viral marketing, this article aims to investigate the constellation of diffusion methods for viral marketing. Studies on diffusion methods for viral marketing have applied different computational methods, but a systematic investigation of these methods has limited. Most of the literature have focused on achieving objectives such as influence maximization or community detection. Therefore, this article aims to conduct an in-depth review of works related to diffusion for viral marketing. Viral marketing has applied to business-to-consumer transactions but has seen limited adoption in business-to-business transactions. The literature review reveals a lack of new diffusion methods, especially in dynamic and large-scale networks. It also offers insights into applying various mining methods for viral marketing. It discusses some of the challenges, limitations, and future research directions of information diffusion for viral marketing. The article also introduces a viral marketing information diffusion model. The proposed model attempts to solve the dynamicity and large-scale data of social networks by adopting incremental clustering and a stochastic differential equation for business-to-business transactions. Keywords—information diffusion; viral marketing; social media marketing; social networks