Identifying Influential Users Of Micro-Blogging Services: A Dynamic Action-Based Network Approach

In this paper, we present a dynamic model to identify influential users of micro-blogging services. Micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, allow their users (twitterers) to publish tweets and choose to follow other users to receive tweets. Previous work on user influence on Twitter, concerns more on following link structure and the contents user published, seldom emphasizes the importance of interactions among users. We argue that, by emphasizing on user actions in micro-blogging platform, user influence could be measured more accurately. Since micro-blogging is a powerful social media and communication platform, identifying influential users according to user interactions has more practical meanings, e.g., advertisers may concern how many actions – buying, in this scenario – the influential users could initiate rather than how many advertisements they spread. By introducing the idea of PageRank algorithm, innovatively, we propose our model using action-based network which could capture the ability of influential users when they interacting with micro-blogging platform. Taking the evolving prosperity of micro-blogging into consideration, we extend our action-based user influence model into a dynamic one, which could distinguish influential users in different time periods. Simulation results demonstrate that our models could support and give reasonable explanations for the scenarios that we considered.