Discovering groups of key potential customers in social networks: A multi-objective optimization model

Nowadays, the popularity of social networks as marketing tools has brought a deal of attention to social networks analysis (SNA). One of the well-known Problems in this field is influence maximization problems which related to flow of information within networks. Although, the problem have been considered by many researchers, the concept behind of this problem has been used less in business context. In this paper, by using a cost-benefits analysis, we propose a multi-objective optimization model which helps to identify the key nodes location, which are a symbol of potential influential customers in real social networks. The main novelty of this model is that it determines the best nodes by combining two essential and realistic elements simultaneously: diffusion speed and dispersion cost. Also, the performance of the proposed model is validated by detecting key nodes on a real social network