Identifying target audience on enterprise social network

Purpose Delivering messages and information to potentially interested users is one of the distinguishing applications of online enterprise social network (ESN). The purpose of this paper is to provide insights to better understand the repost preferences of users and provide personalized information service in enterprise social media marketing. Design/methodology/approach It is accomplished by constructing a target audience identification framework. Repost preference latent Dirichlet allocation (RPLDA) topic model topic model is proposed to understand the mass user online repost preferences toward different contents. A topic-oriented preference metric is proposed to measure the preference degree of individual users. And the function of reposting forecasting is formulated to identify target audience. Findings The empirical research shows the following: a total of 20 percent of the repost users in ESN represent the key active users who are particularly interested in the latent topic of messages in ESN and fits Pareto distribution; and the target audience identification framework can successfully identify different target key users for messages with different latent topics. Practical implications The findings should motivate marketing managers to improve enterprise brand by identifying key target audience in ESN and marketing in a way that truthfully reflects personalized preferences. Originality/value This study runs counter to most current business practices, which tend to use simple popularity to seek important users. Adaptively and dynamically identifying target audience appears to have considerable potential, especially in the rapidly growing area of enterprise social media information service.