A Successful Advertising Strategy over Twitter

Abstract

Large information cascades over online social networks have attracted a great deal of attention. The life times of most cascades are quite short, whereas recent advertising campaigns sometimes generate long-lived ones by employing effective dissemination strategies (instant-win, reminders, etc.). This paper reports one such campaign, YOGUR STAND, on the Twitter network in Japan. The data analysis shows that the campaign popularity has two interesting features. (1) It shows elastic behavior in that the impact of the destructive earthquake on the popularity was quite temporary. (2) It exhibits stationary behavior in that the campaign account gained approximately 2,000 new followers every day.The analysis also demonstrates that there were communities in the campaign participants. The campaign was successful because about 2.4 million Twitter users received the campaign retweets every day and 10-15% of them received the retweets for the first time.