Opinion leaders selection in the social networks based on trust relationships propagation

Today, social networks become very popular and include a wide range of users. In these networks, some users have a great influence ratio to other users who are called opinion leaders. They can use their influence on many issues, such as political, economic, education, social, etc. In this paper, we propose a new framework to select the opinion leaders in online communities. The framework uses the trust relationship between the users and evaluates the total trust value (TTV) of primary opinion leaders between other users to select the highest of them. According to the obtained results, the proposed framework in comparison of top in-degree method, top out-degree method, top centrality method and hybrid IO-degree method provides better results in the social network marketing (SNM) campaigning.