Optimal Campaign Strategy for Social Media Marketing with a Contrarian Population

Vineeth Varma (1) , Bikash Adhikari (1) , Irinel-Constantin Morarescu (1) , Elena Panteley (2)

1 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy
2 L2S - Laboratoire des signaux et systèmes

We address formally the problem of opinion dynamics when the social network composed of conformists and contrarians are not only influenced by their neighbors, but also by an external influential entity referred to as a marketer. The population of contrarians tries to have an opinion that is the opposite of the opinion held by the conformists. The influential entity tries to sway the overall opinion as close as possible to the desired opinion by using a specific influence budget. The main technical issue addressed is finding how the marketer should allocate its budget among the agents such that the agents’ opinion will be as close as possible to the desired opinion while taking into account the behavior of the contrarian population. Our main results show that the marketer has to prioritize certain agents over others based on their initial condition, their influence power in the social graph and the population class they belong to. Numerical examples illustrate the analysis.

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Automatic

Vineeth Varma, Bikash Adhikari, Irinel-Constantin Morarescu, Elena Panteley. Optimal Campaign Strategy for Social Media Marketing with a Contrarian Population. Network Games, Control and Optimization, 1354, Springer International Publishing, pp.241-251, 2021, Communications in Computer and Information Science, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-87473-5_21⟩. ⟨hal-03456869⟩