An Effective Tool for Recommending Opinion Leaders in Social Networking Service

In this paper, we propose and present a practical tool for social networking services that can be used to help users find the opinion leaders or influential users in a certain community. This tool can act as a front-end to existing social networking services such as Twitter and gives a list of influential users in their network given a topic. Our approach differs from most of existing recommendation techniques in that it is based on not only each user’s popularity and interconnection strength in the social network, but also his/her profile and level of activities regarding the topic. Thus, users of our tool can be more assured of the reliability of each recommendation. Experiments with some Twitter users’ data showed that our integrated recommendation scheme performs better than any single structure-based or content-based method. Keywords— social networking services, user search, recommendation, social network analysis, opinion leader.