Influence maximization in viral marketing with expert and influential leader discovery approach

The appearance of social networks has been one of the most important events in the last decade. A social network is a network of interaction and communication whose nodes are its members and its edges are the relation between them. An outstanding concept in social networks is the concept of social influence which is of great significance. Social influence is the behavioral transformation in a person, caused by his/her relationship with other people, organizations and the network. Today, the concept of social influence is used in viral marketing. The aim of viral marketing is to find a small subset of influential users in the social networks for marketing a product. The aim of this paper is to offer an algorithm in order to choose expert and influential users in social networks. This algorithm uses leader discovery method in social networks for choosing expert and influential users. This method chooses those users as the expert and influential leaders of the social networks, who are influential among the other members and also those users that have enough specialty and knowledge about the marketing product. Consequently, the process of selecting expert and influential users for the algorithm would be quick and also the selected leaders are influential and expert enough to do marketing and advertising in the social network.