Determining Influential Users on Social Networks
Social networks have many users with different interests and reasons for connecting with other users. This characteristic makes topic specificity “important when analyzing the hub and authority users as it provides the context to user hub or authority.” (Roy et al) For example, if there were two influential users with similar hub and authority values it is still unclear if these two users should be recommended to each other. This is because one user may be a popular food account that has many other food-loving followers, while the other user is a popular dog-loving account with many other dog-loving followers. They both have a large following in their respective social groups which leads them to appear similar in a topic oblivious hub and authority model when they are in fact quite different.
By incorporating topic specificity when identifying hub and authority users, a more accurate evaluation of a social network is possible. For example, “the ‘k-pop’ topic in Twitter also has interesting authority and hub users; the top authority users are mainly k-pop news media and k-pop band fan groups, while the top hub users are k-pop fans with average number of followers.” (Roy et al) If we had only looked at the hub and authority values of this social group, the hubs would have been misunderstood as significant hub users since they are connected to multiple influential authorities in the k-pop network. Knowing the nature of this social group, we are able to understand that the hub scores for this topic are not very relevant and should not be considered heavily when analyzing influential users. Lastly, another benefit of identifying topic-specific hub and authority users is effective marketing. Certain companies can target specific topic authorities to promote their product that coincides with the nature of the social platform the authority is a part of.
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