Opinion modeling on social media and marketing aspects

TL;DR

This paper develops kinetic models of opinion formation and product popularity spreading on social media, demonstrating their qualitative agreement with real data and potential applications in targeted marketing strategies.

Contribution

It introduces coupled kinetic models for opinion dynamics and product popularity, linking social network structure with marketing outcomes.

Findings

Models align qualitatively with observed hashtag trends

Network structure influences product advertisement effectiveness

Potential for companies to optimize marketing strategies

Abstract

We introduce and discuss kinetic models of opinion formation on social networks in which the distribution function depends on both the opinion and the connectivity of the agents. The opinion formation model is subsequently coupled with a kinetic model describing the spreading of popularity of a product on the web through a social network. Numerical experiments on the underlying kinetic models show a good qualitative agreement with some measured trends of hashtags on social media websites and illustrate how companies can take advantage of the network structure to obtain at best the advertisement of their products.