Detecting Influencers in Social Media using information from their followers

Given the task of finding influencers of a given domain (i.e. banking) in a social network, in this paper we investigate (i) the importance of characterizing followers for the automatic detection of influencers; (ii) the most effective way to combine signals obtained from followers and from the main profiles for the automatic detection of influencers. In this work, we have modeled the discourse used in two domains, banking and automotive, as well as the language used by the influencers in such domains and by their followers, and used these Language Models to estimate the probability of being influencer. Our most remarkable finding is that influencers not only depend on their expertise on the domain but also on that of their followers, so that the more knowledge and number of experts among their followers, the more probability of being influencer a profile has.