Viral Marketing Propagation Oriented to Marketing Context

摘要

Viral marketing exploits social networks to market new product, where users are encouraged to recommend products to their friends. Propagating model is base of other researches on viral marketing, which describes how marketing information is propagated from seed users to other users. In this paper, it is found that currently widely used Independent Cascade (IC) model is not adapted to marketing context where a user will accept recommendation only when the recommendation come from a lot of his friends. Based on the finding, k-order propagating model oriented to marketing context is proposed. Two specific k-order propagating are studied, respectively General_KP and Binary_KP. Using Twitter, Friendster and Random dataset, there 384 experiments are made to show propagating results based on proposed models. The results show that influence order k has important influence on propagating process, which illustrate that k-order propagating model is key to viral marketing.