A heuristic algorithm for profit maximization problem on customer social networking

The rapidly increasing development of online social networking sites such as Facebook, Epinions and Twitter has facilitated immense opportunities for viral marketing. In the presence of “word-of-mouth” referral, individuals´ decisions to purchase a product or adopt an innovation are strongly influenced by recommendations from their friends and acquaintances. With the tremendous popularity of social networking sites, enterprises have begun to explore the valuable information from customer social networking. Given huge numbers of customers and the pairwise influencing weights, how to choose appropriate customers as promotion group and target group and then obtain the maximum profit is one of the key issues in marketing´s decision-making. This paper introduces a novel profit maximization model and proposes a heuristic-based algorithm to solve this problem.