Survey of various techniques for determining influential users in social networks

Abstract

Into the bloggers or a blog network, there are some users who cause a great influence over other users of the network. In this paper we refer these kinds of users as Influential Users (IU). IUs are those users that cause the other users to do some actions on the documents and contents published by him or her. The IU is being used by different organizations for viral marketing by using blogging sites. The organization wants to market a new product by using a small group of potential users to get profit. In this paper, we focus on the various approaches that helps in determination of IUs, some of them are based on the topology of the social network and some are based on hyperlink and later we discuss the new approach to finding the influential user which is based on the activities that the users performs in social networks, utilizing their diffusion history.