Abstract: Utilizing the word-of-mouth and social influences of key users in the social network, seeding strategies have already been successfully applied to the promotion of new products.  The rising popularity of social media marketing provides marketers with the opportunities to observe and exploit the characteristics of massive social networks, so that better seeding strategies could be implemented.  However, there is limited research on the design of a unifying methodology framework for identifying seeding users and evaluating their values to the diffusion of innovation. Our essay's major contributions are summarized as follows. First, we proposed a basic theoretical framework for the selection of seeding users by identifying key users in the social network.  The process is iterative, in the sense that the quality of diffusion is monitored to dynamically adjust the seeding strategy.  Then, we designed simulation experiments to validate our framework under a variety of circumstances.  We discovered that seeding strategies which utilized group-level central information within a social network are effective in the early stage of the process of the diffusion of new product, and that network structures with high connectivity and low redundancy can facilitate the spread of innovation.  While seeding useis are central in initiating the diffusion, their values diminish marginally as the market saturates.  Finally, we found that social influence mechanisms can significantly affect the performance of new product’s diffusion.

Key words: social media marketing, seeding strategies, diffusion of new products, social network, network and diffusion