Determining Influential Users in Social Networks (The Case of: Word of Mouth on Digikala Company Instagram Page)

Abstract

The emergence of social networks is one of the most influential phenomena of the 21st century. Social networking cyberspace creates a broad area of information and a variety of semantic representations. Social networks connect different people with different interests and ideas together. Due to the huge amount of intellectual potential and human thought in social networks, a great number of businessmen or retailors and commerce managers are attracted to such networks. The main objective of this study is to identify the most effective members in the cycle of content propagation on social networks and to propose solutions to improve the propagation of advertising and marketing on social networks to help business owners and managers. The case study of this research is "DigiKala" Instagram social network. At first, using the NodeXL software, the general content of DigiKala Instagram pages were collected. In the next step, applying clustering methods we found effective people using AlSuwaidan framework. Then, the collected data were processed using Matlab software. Finally, the obtained results were evaluated and based on the tests, 9 of the most influential people in accordance with the highest coefficient in publishing content on the social network were introduced.

Keywords

• Cyberspace
• Identification forum
• Social networking
• Viral marketing
• Word of mouth