A method of measuring user influence in MicroBlog

Abstract

Microblog is a popular social networking service. In order to analyze the user behavior in microblog, a method is proposed in this paper to measure the influence of users. By analyzing the data set collected from Sina microblog, it is worth noting that the number of the followers and friends obey power-law distribution. In addition, the users display a weak correlation in their number of followers and friends, and show a strong correlation in their retweet influence and mention influence. Besides, we propose a method to model user influence by taking consideration the factors including the number of followers and friends as well as the scale of the network. The experiment results indicate that the model can calculate the value of user influence and effectively reflect the influence of users. The proposed method and result have important implications in understanding human behaviors and provide new insights for microblog's study. Show more