Leveraging Power in Networks for Online Marketing
The main goal of online marketing is to promote a product to the online audience. However, there are different ways to optimize for this. For example, sometimes, a company may choose to target loyal customers who always come back, or other times a company may choose to target the specific demographic of young teenagers. Either way, what all online marketers hope to achieve is increased exposure to the product/brand. They hope to increase traffic to their product, so that more sales can be made.
A common strategy to attract new followers is to associate with members of social media with a strong online presence. This can be seen in many forms. Celebrities are paid handsomely for endorsing products. Top reviewers on Amazon are spammed with free products for their “honest and unbiased reviews”. Essentially the entire advertising business is built off of this principle. A product that associates with people with large socially-connect network will also inherit some of the members of that same network.
In a certain sense, this relates to the principle of triadic closure. Followers of a celebrity are connected to the celebrity. When the celebrity becomes connected with a product, the followers would also like to be connected with the product. This also relates to fact that products want to be powerful nodes in the online network of the web. Ideally, products should have many links connecting to them for high visibility. Tapping into the power of people with high social presence allows for the increase in power of a node in the web network.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/274522