On-demand Influencer Discovery on Social Media

Identifying influencers on social media, such as Twitter, has played a central role in many applications, including online marketing and political campaigns. Compared with social media celebrities, domain-specific influencers are less expensive to hire and more engaged in spreading messages such as new treatment or timely prevention for HIV. However, most of the existing topic modeling based approaches fail to identify influencers who are dedicated to the rare yet important topics such as HIV and suicide. To alleviate this limitation, we investigate an on-Demand Influencer Discovery (DID) framework that is able to identify influencers on any subject depicted by a few user-specified keywords, regardless of its popularity on social media. The DID model employs an iterative learning process that integrates the language attention network as a subject filter and the influence convolution network built on user interactions. Comprehensive evaluations on Twitter datasets show that the DID model can reliably identify influencers even on rare subjects such as HIV and suicide, outperforming existing topic-specific influencer detection models.