Measuring social influence
Description
Links in social media determine the flow of information and hence indicate a user's influence on others - a concept that is crucial in sociology and viral marketing. In our studies, we compare various measures of influence: indegree, retweets, and mentions. Based on these measures, we investigate the dynamics of user influence across topics and time. We make several interesting observations. First, most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics. Second, influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic. These results suggest that social influence is topic-dependent.
Publications
Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Washington, DC, USA, May 2010.
Datasets
Media Coverage