Order-sensitive competitive revenue maximization for viral marketing in social networks

The Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM) problem is a critical issue in viral marketing, focusing on selecting a set of influential individuals, known as seed users, for competitors to maximize their revenue. These seed users have significant sway in social networks and serve as valuable marketing resources provided by the platform. They are often displayed in a certain order launched by the platform and the potential information hidden in the order can profoundly affect the final marketing outcomes. However, current CIM research predominantly emphasizes designing effective algorithms for seed selection while ignoring the impact of the seed order launched by the platform. Therefore, this paper focuses on identifying the optimal seed order to maximize platform revenue in a competitive market environment. Specifically, we introduce a new problem called Order-Sensitive Competitive Revenue Maximization (OSCRM) to investigate the CIM problem from a new practical perspective. We prove the problem to be NP-hard and present a simple greedy algorithm with a 1/3-approximate ratio. To address it more efficiently, we further propose an enhanced greedy algorithm called GMST. This algorithm leverages the maximum spanning tree (MST) and achieves a 1/2-approximate ratio. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed GMST algorithm. •We propose a new problem to exploit the impact of seed orders for viral marketing.•The proposed OSCRM problem is proven to be NP-hard.•We propose efficient algorithms for the OSCRM problem with approximation guarantees.•Experiments verify the importance of this problem and the efficiency of algorithms.