Effectiveness of incorporating follow relation into searching for twitter users to follow

Abstract

Twitter is one of the most popular microblogging services that facilitate real-time information collection, provision, and sharing. Following influential Twitter users is one way to get valuable information related to a topic of interest efficiently. Recently many researches on this issue have been done and, in general, it is said that the follow relation is not useful for measuring user influence. In this paper, we study effectiveness of incorporating not only the tweet activity (retweet and mention) but also the follow relation into searching for good Twitter users to follow for getting information on a topic of interest. We present a method for finding Twitter users based on both the follow relation and the tweet activity, and show the follow relation could improve the performance as compared with methods based on only the tweet activity.