Detection of Opinion Leaders in Social Networks: A Survey

Abstract

With the development of new media such as social networking sites, content sharing sites, blogs and micro blogs a profound transformation in terms of communication between consumers and companies has been created. In fact, this great revolution of the web has allowed different users to interact, express their opinion on a product or a service and post comments. Then, internet users have gone from passive to active actors who are able to produce information and make data available on the web as a rich opinions source. Therefore companies must deal with this reality, to know what others may say about their products of competing brands because the only and the best way to sell their products in good condition is to produce what consumers want. Along with this phenomenon, recent years have seen the birth of a generation of Internet users elected by the company to help it to manage its on-line reputation. Those users are called opinion leaders or influencers; they have a high capacity to influence those around them because they are considered to be more experienced, objective and able of provoking the emotions of someone else. Therefore the necessity of identifying opinion leaders has been proved more and more crucial. The goal of this paper is to present different research works that aimed to detect opinions leaders in social network.