Maximizing micro-blog influence in online promotion

The opportunities for dynamic and timely interaction afforded by micro-blogs, accompanied by the increasingly widespread use of mobile devices, have drawn disparate groups of people together to form communities online. For businesses, marketers should not underestimate the importance of understanding and communicating effectively with customers, but it is difficult to use micro-blogs to estimate bloggers' marketing influence due to their lack of structure. In this study, a framework is proposed for identifying opinion leaders and maximizing the dissemination of messages by analyzing existing micro-blogs. More specifically, the framework enables companies to ascertain the subjects of marketing, select keywords, retrieve micro-blog content and blogger information, form ontologies, estimate and analyze the indices of bloggers' influence, identify opinion leaders, and maximize message dissemination. We use Weibo, the most popular micro-blog platform in China to demonstrate the framework. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.