An analytical method to identify social ambassadors for a mobile service provider's brand page on facebook

Abstract

Social media is emerging as the mode of choice of internet users to communicate, collaborate and share content. Marketers are also increasingly making use of this media to identify potential customers and get them connected to their brand. An important aspect of using social media for advertising is the scope for utilizing word-of-mouth and endorsements from existing customers and subscribers. In this way, advertisers can identify users who can act as social ambassadors to influence other users to buy, try or subscribe to their products or services. In this work, we propose an analytical method to identify potential social ambassadors of brand pages of mobile service providers. The study makes use of a set of users on social media, specifically Facebook, who have high degree of association with the brand page. Users with higher association values could be shown more updates about the brand page and vice versa. We propose a method to ascertain the weights associated with the metric association value and show statistically that the results determined by the proposed method are intuitively valid because they match with the opinions given by domain experts. © 2015 IEEE.