Influence fast or later: Two types of influencers in social networks

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/ac4484

Abstract In real-world networks, there usually exist a small set of nodes that play an important role in the structure and function of networks. Those vital nodes can influence most of other nodes in the network via a spreading process. While most of the existing works focused on vital nodes that can maximize the spreading size in the final stage, which we call final influencers, recent work proposed the idea of fast influencers, which emphasizes nodes' spreading capacity at the early stage. Despite the recent surge of efforts in identifying these two types of influencers in networks, there remained limited research on untangling the differences between the fast influencers and final influencers. In this paper, we firstly distinguish the two types of influencers: fast-only influencers and final-only influencers. The former is defined as individuals who can achieve a high spreading effect at the early stage but lose their superiority in the final stage, and the latter are those individuals that fail to exhibit a prominent spreading performance at the early stage but influence a large fraction of nodes at the final stage. Further experiments are based on eight empirical datasets, and we reveal the key differences between the two types of influencers concerning their spreading capacity and the local structures. We also analyze how network degree assortativity influences the fraction of the proposed two types of influencers. The results demonstrate that with the increase of degree assortativity, the fraction of the fast-only influencers decreases, which indicates that more fast influencers tend to keep their superiority at the final stage. Our study provides insights into the differences and evolution of different types of influencers and has important implications for various empirical applications, such as advertisement marketing and epidemic suppressing.

Keywords: social networks fast influencers final influencers spreading dynamics degree assortativity

Received: 31 July 2021
Revised: 24 November 2021
Accepted manuscript online: 18 December 2021

PACS:	89.75.Fb	(Structures and organization in complex systems)
	64.60.aq	(Networks)

Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61673150 and 11622538) and Special Project for the Central Guidance on Local Science and Technology Development of Sichuan Province, China (Project No. 2021ZYD0029).

Corresponding Authors: Linyuan Lü
E-mail: linyuan.lv@uestc.edu.cn

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Fang Zhou(周方), Chang Su(苏畅), Shuqi Xu(徐舒琪), and Linyuan Lü(吕琳媛) Influence fast or later: Two types of influencers in social networks 2022 Chin. Phys. B 31 068901

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Influence fast or later: Two types of influencers in social networks

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