Estimation and maximization of user influence in social networks

Abstract

Marketing companies explore several strategies with a fundamental goal of increasing sales; one such popular emerging strategy is Social Media Marketing. People are more likely to adopt a product recommended received from their acquaintances or based on product reviews. In this regard, a mixed influence model is used for studying the effect of comments on a product post. Also, a Greedy discounting technique targeting potential customers with an objective to maximize revenue as well as increase the social contagion. Here, we aim to increase the influence on people by offering the product for free to potential buyers who are capable of influencing more people and then the product is offered at increasing price, i.e., decreasing discount rates and increasing the revenue as well as the growth of the influence among customers’ acquaintances. Computational experiments are conducted on real-world networks representing different scenarios with varying complexities and tested the effectiveness of these algorithms.