Bibliometric analysis and literature review of viral marketing

Viral marketing is a strategic approach that motivates customers to share product information on social networks, giving companies a cost-effective competitive advantage. However, existing research is fragmented, necessitating a comprehensive review of past and future studies. The main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the scientific literature on viral marketing in order to identify past research trends, the intellectual structure of the field, and its future directions. This study is a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer and Gephi software to review 449 selected articles on the Web of Science between 2000 and 2023. The analysis covers key metrics such as the number of articles, citations, bibliographic coupling, co-word analysis, and prestige analysis. Then, co-authorship analysis, co-citation analysis, and dynamic co-citation analysis were used for network analysis. The study identifies five main thematic areas: (1) behavioural aspects and reasons for expanding viral marketing, (2) social network analysis and cascade prediction, (3) influence maximisation and diffusion models, (4) target set selection and least cost influence, and (5) algorithms in viral marketing. The conclusion of the study suggests that clusters 1 and 3 are expected to attract increasing scholarly attention in the coming years.