Negative Effects of Incentivised Viral Campaigns for Activity in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper compares incentivised and non-incentivised viral campaigns in social networks, revealing that incentives do not always lead to better activity and that individual behavior can be somewhat predicted.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of incentivised versus non-incentivised campaigns and analyzes individual behavior prediction limitations.

Findings

Incentivised campaigns do not always outperform non-incentivised ones.

Overlapping effects can diminish the benefits of incentives.

Behavior prediction based on service profiles has limited accuracy.

Abstract

Viral campaigns are crucial methods for word-of-mouth marketing in social communities. The goal of these campaigns is to encourage people for activity. The problem of incentivised and non-incentivised campaigns is studied in the paper. Based on the data collected within the real social networking site both approaches were compared. The experimental results revealed that a highly motivated campaign not necessarily provides better results due to overlapping effect. Additional studies have shown that the behaviour of individual community members in the campaign based on their service profile can be predicted but the classification accuracy may be limited.