Increasing Marketing Campaign Performance Using Influential Users in Social Networks

Social networks have become an important information hub with a huge customer base. Hence businesses try to leverage social networks in their advertising and marketing campaigns. One of the advantages of social networks is that the users can influence their community and friends. Detecting influential users provides multiple benefits for businesses such as more effective advertisement and better user involvement. Many techniques, focusing on network centrality metrics, have been developed to detect influential users. However, these techniques do not handle spammers and fake friends effectively and return inaccurate results. Moreover, they ignore the effect of user-generated content on influence. Knowing who can influence who and in what area is important in advertisement and sale prediction. We aim to provide a solution to accurately detect influential users by integrating sociometric techniques with topic-based influence models while solving the shortcomings of both techniques.

Faculty Supervisor:

Morad Benyoucef;TBD

Student:

Partner:

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and cultural industries; Manufacturing; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Ottawa

Program:

Accelerate