Evaluating User Community Influence in Online Social Networks

Word-of-mouth (or viral) marketing effects have raised the problem of how to discover the influential members in a community in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper, we develop a novel model to evaluate the influential strength and identify the most influential users of a community in OSNs. We define a new concept of community label, which is used to represent the attributes that are possessed by most of the members in a community. By analyzing the interpersonal structure and the unique characteristics of a community in OSNs, we show that the number of friends, the quality of friends, and the community label, are three key factors to a user's community influence which means a user's social influence in a community. Experimental results show that our model can evaluate a user's community influence with higher efficiency and more rationality than traditional models.