Social stream marketing on Facebook: a case study

Abstract

Recently, social network marketing has gained tremendously in popularity. There are increasing numbers of web-based companies that focus their marketing strategies on social network platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Even if social network marketing is perceived as a huge success, little or nothing is known about how well such social network-based marketing campaigns perform. To contribute to this field of research, we present in this paper the results of an ad-driven social network-based marketing campaign centred on the social network Facebook. In particular, we demonstrate in the extent to which ads placed on the user’s social stream and generated by the Facebook tools and applications can increase the number of visits, profit or ROI of a web-based platform called VirWoX. In addition to these findings, we present an analysis of a number of simple real-time measures to detect the most ‘valuable’ users on Facebook. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides such detailed results of a social stream marketing campaign using Facebook. This paper is relevant for engineers, researchers or teachers who are interested in the field of social media marketing.