Measuring the community value in online social networks

Communities in social networks form with different purposes and play a significant role in interpersonal interactions. Analysis of virtual communities indicates a more precise understanding of the behaviours and desires of individuals in social networks. In this paper, new measures have been proposed for analyzing implicit and explicit communities in Online Social Networks (OSNs). The measures of “potential value of the community members” and “value of the community messages”, which are used for calculating the measure of “community value” are among the most important measures introduced in this paper. Another measure introduced is “user influence rate” in a community, which represents the contribution of a person in creating value in a community. To provide a sound dataset, we collected the information from several real implicit communities in Twitter based on different hashtags. Finally, the suggested measures have been analyzed and compared statistically and behaviourally across different communities. The results of this research well indicate the importance and practicality of the measures introduced in Community analysis of Twitter.