Following the follower: detecting communities with common interests on twitter

Abstract

We propose an efficient approach for detecting communities that share common interests on Twitter, based on linkages among followers of celebrities representing an interest category. This approach differs from existing ones that detects all communities before determining the interest of these communities, a computationally intensive process given the large scale of online social networks. In addition, we also study the characteristics of these communities and the effects of deepening or specialization of interest.