Analyzing the Effects of Virality and Topology for Information Diffusion in Social Networks

Virality is a term which reflects the popularity of a certain topic or message in a social environment. Taking into account the network topology, i.e. the relational hierarchy of individuals, we propose an analysis of networks with different connectivity degrees between nodes. We model the behavior of the social network in terms of information diffusion, starting with an initially chosen source node. Then, we observe how the value of virality impacts on the information spreading process with various other influence factors such as the topological position of the source node or its number of neighbors. To verify the correctness of the simulated diffusion process, we also provide an analytical method.