Determining the opinion leaders in online social networks

As online social networks have become the most visited web portals, marketing professionals are having more attention over them. Besides advertising options of the OSNs, advertisers try to leverage content marketing by creating organic word of mouth and earned media. Because of this situation, opinion leaders or key influencers in OSNs become the center of marketing plans but the main issue is how to detect those nodes. In literature, there are different studies in different domains and use several different methods to find out who are those opinion leaders. The common methodology among those studies is centrality and also degree centrality is called a simple and better way to determine the key nodes. In this study, the opinion leaders identification methodology is defined as a combination of degree centrality and engagement rate algorithms. The method is implemented on Facebook domain through a special community by matching existed attributes with the algorithms to clarify how it can be used in marketers' real time operations.