A diffusion planning mechanism for social marketing

Social media is gaining importance as a component of marketing strategies. Many types of social media, such as social networking sites, blogospheres and micro-blogospheres, have been seeking business opportunities and establishing brand expression in the recent years. Online marketing information diffusion has become the critical business model of online social networks. However, most of the current marketing studies on discovering potential influences do not appropriately support them to diffuse advertisements. Therefore, marketing information may be lost during the diffusion process and cannot be sent to potential customers successfully. In this research, a diffusion path planning mechanism for advertisements is developed to help influencers to propagate marketing information and help marketers to evaluate possible rewards under different marketing strategies. Our experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can significantly improve the diffusion process of advertising messages and decrease marketing uncertainty.