The Cascade Capacity Predicts Individuals to Seed for Diffusion Through Social Networks

Why ideas and practices spread an important topic for management scholars and practitioners. This paper presents the cascade capacity as an aspect of network structure as a measure of essentially how ‘choosy’ everyone in a social network can be and still allow an individual to cause something to spread completely through the network. Drawing on social contagion theory and network theory, we propose a research model about how network structure relates to diffusion and test it by simulation, using network data from the popular microblogging service Twitter. Results show the cascade capacity is an important determinant of diffusion, even when we model for homophily. We show how the concept could be used to select individuals to seed to encourage word of mouth marketing.