Who to activate next? Predicting influential and susceptible users in social media marketing with CFT-SIS

Purpose
The proliferation of online social networks (OSNs) has brought opportunities and challenges in managing marketing information flows. This study aims to develop an organization-level personalized monitoring model for marketing campaigns, which not only tracks the dynamics of information dissemination but also identifies influential, susceptible and cost-efficient participants to activate in the next round of campaigns.

Design/methodology/approach
This study develops a novel CFT-SIS framework that integrates curated flows theory (CFT) with the epidemiological susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) framework and differentiates information dissemination through broadcasting and narrowcasting channels. It combines users’ susceptibility with their historical influence in brand-specific campaigns to construct the influence-susceptibility index (ISI), precisely measuring both activation difficulty and resulting impact.

Findings
The CFT-SIS framework enables real-time monitoring of information diffusion by capturing both horizontal spread within individual campaigns and longitudinal interconnections across multiple campaigns. Compared to conventional SIS formulations, it demonstrates higher accuracy and stability in predicting user states. The proposed ISI effectively identifies dual-role users who are both highly influential and easily activated, enabling deeper propagation at lower cost and highlighting participants who drive sustained campaign success.

Originality/value
This study advances theoretical understanding of sustained social media marketing by identifying a novel and structurally emergent mechanism through which curation hierarchy reshapes user susceptibility and influence across network positions over time. In practice, the model enables the identification of high-impact, easily activated users, supporting more efficient campaign design and resource allocation in social media marketing.