This paper focuses on influence maximization or opinion control in the voting dynamics on social networks. We show two simple heuristics that are effective strategies to enhance vote shares: (i) avoiding the nodes controlled by your opponent when having a lower budget while focusing on them when having a larger budget (shadowing) and (ii) ringfencing her influence by targeting control on adjacent nodes (shielding). The paper presents an empirical numerical evaluation of these strategies for various classes of complex networks which is backed up by analytical results obtained via a mean-field approach, in good agreement with numerical results. Importantly, we also show that optimal influence allocations tend to not be localized, but can include targeting nodes significant distances away from opposing influence.

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