Social Influence Analysis for Information Diffusion in Complex Commercial Network

Abstract

Social influence causes ideas to diffuse across the globe and track the rate at which awareness spans through online social communities. The users with better connectivity and higher interactivity bear greater potentials of spreading as well as perceiving the social trend. This concept has been further considered in the research to identify such prospective users in social network with high probability of influencing the opinions of others to whom they are connected. For the experimentation, Twitter profiles of 1900 followers from three major e-commerce portals, including Amazon, Snapdeal, and Flipkart, have been extracted to serve as the social network for conducting research. Acquired data is further narrowed down to yield a set of influential users in terms of central and centrally active, which are parameterized by neighborhood size and frequency of Twitter activity of individuals. Diffusion analysis is further performed on the derived set of key influencers to track the rate at which information propagates in the network.