Battle of positioning: exploring the role of bridges in competitive diffusion

While social media facilitate product diffusion, the co-existence of competing products makes the diffusion process complex. This study employs an agent-based model to simulate competitive diffusion on social networks and examines the role of a special network position, network bridges, in influencing the diffusion process. The simulation experiments show that targeting bridges can help the weak product with an initially decreasing diffusion curve to increase its market share. The effect of bridges in competitive diffusion increases with the intensity of market competition. This study also reveals that the effect of bridges is larger when the degree distribution of a network has a lower variation. Overall, bridges can be effective alternatives to network hubs in winning market share. Our analysis based on a large-scale real social network further reveals that bridges enhance the offensive and defensive power of a product. This study offers a systematical exploration of the impact of bridges in competitive diffusion under various conditions and the underlying mechanism. It provides guidance for firms competing in social media regarding whom to target (i.e., bridges vs. hubs) and how effective the targeting strategy is.