We investigate a class of emerging online marketing challenges in social networks; macro behavioral targeting (MBT) is introduced as non-personalized broadcasting efforts to massive populations. We propose a new probabilistic graphical model for MBT. Further, a linear-time approximation method is proposed to circumvent an intractable parametric representation of user behaviors. We compare the proposed model with the existing state-of-the-art method on real datasets from social networks. Our model outperforms in all categories by comfortable margins.
Publication:
13th SIAM Data Mining 2013
Yusheng Xie, Zhengzhang Chen, Kunpeng Zhang, Md. Mostofa Ali Patwary, Yu Cheng, Haotian Liu, Ankit Agrawal, and Alok Choudhary. Graphical Modeling of Macro Behavioral Targeting in Social Networks- A version has been sent to a top Marketing journal for review.
- Target audience: Brand and social media marketers and researchers
- Problem: Marketers spend millions every month to acquire Facebook fans
- We spent $30M and acquired 20M FB fans. Now what? – a major US retailer
- Research question: How to optimally engage one’s fans so that they stay active and retain their value to the brand?
- FB user => Fan => Engaged Fan => Customer