Detecting influential users using spread of communications

Abstract

This article discusses about detecting the most influential users in an online social network. We observe that a communication of an influential user is likely to reach many more users than the same made by a user having lesser influence in the network. Based on this observation, We have formulated a method using the spread of communications (i.e., the number of users the communication reaches). We have verified the method on three datasets downloaded from `Twitter' and results are found to be the best among existing methods on the said datasets.