Exploring social influence via posterior effect of word-of-mouth recommendations

Word-of-mouth has proven an effective strategy for promoting products through social relations. Particularly, existing studies have convincingly demonstrated that word-of-mouth recommendations can boost users' prior expectation and hence encourage them to adopt a certain innovation, such as buying a book or watching a movie. However, less attention has been paid to studying the posterior effect of word-of-mouth recommendations, i.e., whether or not word-of-mouth recommendations can influence users' posterior evaluation on the products or services recommended to them, the answer to which is critical to estimating user satisfaction when proposing a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. In order to fill this gap, in this paper we empirically study the above issue and verify that word-of-mouth recommendations are strongly associated with users' posterior evaluation. Through elaborately designed statistical hypothesis tests we prove the causality that word-of-mouth recommendations directly prompt the posterior evaluation of receivers. Finally, we propose a method for investigating users' social influence, namely, their ability to affect followers' posterior evaluation via word-of-mouth recommendations, by examining the number of their followers and their sensitivity of discovering good items. The experimental results on real datasets show that our method can successfully identify 78% influential friends with strong social influence.