Recognition of Opinion Leaders in Social Networks Using Text Posts’ Trajectory Scoring and Users’ Comments Sentiment Analysis

Identifying opinion leaders in social networks, particularly in social media, is a crucial marketing strategy. These individuals have a considerable influence on the purchasing decisions of their communities. Companies can benefit from collaborating with relevant opinion leaders in their market as this can increase their visibility, establish their credibility, and gain consumer trust, leading to increased sales, improved brand perception, and an expanded market share. Additionally, by gaining a comprehensive understanding of opinion leaders, companies can better comprehend the trends and preferences of their target audience. This allows them to tailor their marketing and product strategies more effectively. Identifying suitable influencers to endorse their products or services is a significant challenge for companies. The identification of opinion leaders is complicated by their informal and unstructured nature, as well as the varying selection criteria depending on the marketing campaign’s goals. While numerous research studies have focused on detecting opinion leaders in social networks based on content, interactions, or a combination of both, few have explored sentiment analysis of post content, received interactions, and user comments in relation to published posts. The purpose of this paper is to present an hybrid approach to detect opinion leaders in Facebook. This approach involves analyzing the trajectory of post content by examining interactions on the post, as well as mining the text content of the post itself and analyzing the users’comments sentiments.