Influence in Social Media Marketing: A Quantitative Evaluation Framework from a Large Scale of Empirical Evidence

Social media creates a novel marketing mechanism to boost opinion formation and information diffusion. As a crucial idea, social influence sheds light on individuals' features in the process of communicating brand stories, and changes other consumers' opinions and behavior. Social media marketing has drawn great interests from scholars in a past decade, but the extant work neglects to establish an effectively quantitative evaluation framework that bridges the gap between the research findings and actual scenes. By scratching a large amount of empirical data, a set of taxonomy methods for extremely imbalanced examples in terms of statistics and relationship analysis have been proposed. The research performance reveals that the inequality social media distribution presents in multiaspects and multiple levels, and our study can precisely classify individuals having diverse social influence into different groups in which individuals possess common characteristics of social influence.