An index model for measuring microblog users' influence

Purpose: The paper aims to build an index model for measuring microblog users' influence by taking microbloggers of Sina Weibo as a research sample.Design/methodology/approach: Our user influence index model emphasizes link analysis and user activities in the microblogging network. We conduct experiments to investigate the performance of our model by using data crawled from Sina Weibo.Findings: User influence is correlated to the attention that a user has received from his/her audience,the user's activities and his/her tweets' influence. Experimental results show that our model can reflect microbloggers' influence in a more reasonable way.Research limitations: More factors need to be considered to identify different influential users at different time periods.Practical implications: The results of the study provide us with insights both into the way to measure microblog users' influence and to rank users based on their influence.Originality/value: By combining link analysis and user activities,this index model can reduce the impact of dummy follower accounts on user influence,reflecting a user's real influence in the microblog system.