Using Social Media for Word-of-Mouth Marketing

TL;DR

This paper explores leveraging Facebook groups for effective word-of-mouth marketing by identifying key influencers and introducing reinforced strategies involving multiple authorities to enhance promotional impact.

Contribution

It introduces a method for WoM marketing in Facebook groups and proposes reinforced WoM marketing with multiple authorities to improve effectiveness.

Findings

Successful identification of influential users in Facebook groups

Reinforced WoM marketing increases promotional reach

Experimental validation on large Facebook dataset

Abstract

Nowadays online social networks are used extensively for personal and commercial purposes. This widespread popularity makes them an ideal platform for advertisements. Social media can be used for both direct and word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing. Although WoM marketing is considered more effective and it requires less advertisement cost, it is currently being under-utilized. To do WoM marketing, we need to identify a set of people who can use their authoritative position in social network to promote a given product. In this paper, we show how to do WoM marketing in Facebook group, which is a question answer type of social network. We also present concept of reinforced WoM marketing, where multiple authorities can together promote a product to increase the effectiveness of marketing. We perform our experiments on Facebook group dataset consisting of 0.3 million messages and 10 million user reactions.