Competitive targeted marketing in social networks with switching topology: Seed selection and consensus shaping

Abstract

The boom of social network platforms has greatly enriched people's platform choices for social interactions, which may cause people to switch frequently in different social networks to chase hot points. Meanwhile, as an advertisement integrator, the social network platform enables firms to implement targeted marketing campaigns to steer people's opinions in their own favor. Identifying the seed set and devising targeted marketing strategies emerge as the key points for firms' success. To tackle such a problem, we develop a game-theoretical framework for targeting marketing resources to network agents with switching topology based on their competitive opinion dynamics. In the framework, the dynamics of agents' opinions are driven by not only the targeted marketing behaviors of competing firms but also the social interactions of agents with switching topology. With capturing these features, we determine the consensus condition and weight property in such dynamics. On this basis, the optimal targeted marketing strategies are derived that firms only need to invest the overlapped opinion leaders of switching networks. And specifically, such a leader with more weight in consensus will gain more marketing resources from firms. Besides that, we further carry out comparative static analysis of relevant factors and discuss the equilibrium strategies with no consensus. Finally, two examples are presented to illustrate our theoretical results. In spite of the mathematical characterization, our paper additionally provides some insights into marketing management.