Social media have enjoyed a rapidly increasing adoption among users in recent years. Millions of users execute billions of actions (in form of tweets, messages, replies, likes, etc.) every day. The massive amount of social interactions online has contributed to the proliferation of social advertising. Alongside the interest in online and social advertising, Twitter has introduced several advert...

We investigate paid endorsement as a crowd-sourcing social advertising mechanism that allows advertisers to bypass publishers (e.g., Facebook) and recruit individual endorsers of their own choice at affordable prices. Specifically, we investigate (i) how incentives affect endorsers’ participation and effectiveness, (ii) what types of endorsers are most effective in generating online engagement ...

We study the impact of social influence on the performance of ads on social networks. Using data for several ads on Facebook for two different firms, we measure the impact of past connections on the click rate and endorsement rate of ads. We find that increase in the connections does not lead to an increase in the click performance and may even decrease the click performance. We also find that ...

By enabling connections between individuals, Social Networking Sites, such as Facebook, promise to create significant individual as well as social value. Encouraging connections between users is also crucial for service providers who increasingly rely on social advertising and viral marketing campaigns as important sources of their revenue. Consequently, understanding user’s network constructio...

Social advertising holds the potential to reshape the traditional advertising industry. Understanding what leads to effective social contagion at the dyadic level lies at the core of cost-effective social advertising strategies. This paper is the first attempt to comprehensively study the effect of dyadic network relationship on social contagion in directed networks. This paper reveals several ...

We consider a setting where agents select among competing products of unknown quality by costly sequential search. The agents are active on an online social network, and late movers benefit from possibly being able to see early movers’ purchase decisions. In this setting we consider the impact of advertising by firms, and the incentives of the underlying social network platform. We consider dis...

In social advertising, ads are targeted based on underlying social networks and their content is tailored with information that pertains to the social relationship. This paper explores the effectiveness of social advertising using data from field tests of different ads on Facebook. We find evidence that social advertising is effective, and that this efficacy seems to stem mainly from the abilit...

a r t i c l e i n f o Social media have increasingly become popular platforms for information dissemination. Recently, companies have attempted to take advantage of social advertising to deliver their advertisements to appropriate customers. The success of message propagation in social media depends greatly on the content relevance and the closeness of social relationships. In this paper, consi...

We consider a strategic online social network that controls information flows between agents in a social learning setting. Agents on the network select among products of competing firms of unknown quality. The network sells advertising to firms. We consider display advertising, which is standard firm-to-consumer advertising, and social advertising, in which agents who purchased that firm’s prod...