Survey of influential user identification techniques in online social networks

Abstract

Online social networks became a remarkable development with wonderful social as well as economic impact within the last decade. Currently the most famous online social network, Facebook, counts more than one billion monthly active users across the globe. Therefore, online social networks attract a great deal of attention among practitioners as well as research communities. Taken together with the huge value of information that online social networks hold, numerous online social networks have been consequently valued at billions of dollars. Hence, a combination of this technical and social phenomenon has evolved worldwide with increasing socioeconomic impact. Online social networks can play important role in viral marketing techniques, due to their power in increasing the functioning of web search, recommendations in various filtering systems, scattering a technology (product) very quickly in the market. In online social networks, among all nodes, it is interesting and important to identify a node which can affect the behaviour of their neighbours; we call such node as Influential node. The main objective of this paper is to provide an overview of various techniques for Influential User identification. The paper also includes some techniques that are based on structural properties of online social networks and those techniques based on content published by the users of social network.