Detecting Entrepreneurial Influencers for Information Diffusion on Social Media
Published:
Detecting Entrepreneurial Influencers for Information Diffusion on Social Media by Bodor Almotairy (2020)
The vision 2030 supports Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and makes them key agents of economic growth. SMEs play a significant role in the economy as they create jobs, increase export and bring innovations. SMEs have capabilities to run the business, but they need access to specialized resources. Such specialized resources are termed ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems. Social media-Twitter in particular- has been used by SMEs to build and extend their relationship with the key players in the ecosystems to get fund, knowledge, consulting, and innovation capabilities. Information diffusion refers to the way information flows and moves between individual and communities within the same social network. Information diffusion is a trending topic in social media research. Finding influential users with high levels of interaction and connection in social media could be used to increase the diffusion of information more quickly, thus increase the interactions between users. This research aims to develop two frameworks, the first one is called ‘ERank’ to detect entrepreneurial influencers at the ecosystem level, while the second is called ‘ECharacterize’ to robustly characterize the Saudi entrepreneurial influencers. Experimental results on a real-life dataset containing 233,018 Arabic tweets show that ERank successfully ranks 8 out of 10 entrepreneurial influencers, considering their position on the result lists, with low computational complexity. The results also show the ability of ECharacterize to distinguish influencers’ features by their popularity, reliability and activity level. The frameworks could be used as a prototype by different entrepreneurship stakeholders to diffuse the information, helping SMEs to find and interact with the other stakeholders, and also help the different agents of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to reach out to SMEs and to provide them with the necessary support in line with the 2030 vision.