Analysis of social influence and information dissemination in social media: The case of Twitter

Abstract

To understand how the influencers of event information dissemination on social media can be identified, we propose three perspectives for investigating this topic: the number of related messages posted by the influencers, the number of related messages in which the influencers are mentioned by other users, and the number of influencers’ messages that are reposted. The findings regarding social influencers can help companies identify the key people or organizations with whom they must engage. In addition, we used a social network diagram to depict how event information is disseminated from the influencers. This diagram shows the top influencers at different stages of information dissemination. Effectively modeling relationships among top users and accordingly using them to filter or recommend information are fundamental for mining social networking services. To illustrate our approach, we used the tweets from the Windows 8.1 launch event as a case study.