Influence of Social Networks in Target Marketing Dept. of CIS- Senior Design 2009-2010 ABSTRACT

Online social networks such as Facebook have shown a huge increase in the number of users. In this work, Facebook will be used as a dataset to see how social networks can be used to provide better target marketing strategies. In our work, a Facebook application was built and products were recommended by users to friends over their social networks. These recommendations are considered to be a form of advertisement. It was shown that: (1) Users are more likely to search for and recommend products with high brand equity, whereas acceptance of a recommendation depends upon complexity of the product that was recommended. (2) Genuine recommendations that are sent out after considering product characteristics such as newness, complexity, risk, and brand equity, have a higher acceptance rate as compared to random recommendations or banner advertisements. This research is important because it will enable marketers to provide more effective marketing strategies by showing that product recommendations play a vital role in increasing the product acceptance rate. It also helps them evaluate the products that do and do not work well over social networks by looking at what product characteristics cause that product to be recommended. 1