Promoting products online using firefly algorithm

Opinions on various products are often shared by web users through online social media. These opinions play an important role in decision making criterion for prospective customers. This sharing of experiences works as electronic -word of mouth (e-WOM) publicity for a product in the internet world. The paper presents a distinct e-marketing strategy that takes advantage of attraction mechanism of firefly algorithm along with quick spread behavior of e-WOM for market campaigning. Firefly algorithm is inspired by biochemical and social aspects of real fireflies. The proposed approach analysis the current trend of market in terms of relevant product features. The user interest towards those features is extracted by mining their opinions. Subsequently market segmentation is done by clustering similar users and best segment(s) is selected for product promotion. The strategy finally exploits the social connectedness among online users to identify the best initial seeds. Thus the proposed approach is capable of attracting the attention of a large span of web users by employing a small fraction of advertising budget and has a potential in current e-marketing scenario.