Identification of influential users in social networks based on users’ interest

• Published in: Information sciences Vol. 493; pp. 217 - 231
• Main Authors: Zareie, Ahmad, Sheikhahmadi, Amir, Jalili, Mahdi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.08.2019
• Subjects: Centrality; Influence maximization; Information spreading; Social network; Users’ interest; Viral marketing; Influence maximization; Social network; Users’ interest; Information spreading; Viral marketing; Centrality
• ISSN: 0020-0255; 1872-6291
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2019.04.033

Ever increasing popularity social networks has attracted many companies to use them for viral marketing. Identification of influential users for spreading news and marketing is a major challenge in viral marketing. In most of the existing influence maximization approaches, the topological locations of nodes on the network has been considered as a criterion to determine their influentiality. They have mainly neglected users’ interest in the marketing message. Although a number of existing works have considered interests of users, they have not used any criterion to specify the interest. This manuscript proposes a novel criterion to measure the interest of users in the marketing messages. We then propose a novel algorithm to obtain the set of the most influential users. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic networks reveal effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to the existing state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms.