A note on maximizing the spread of influence in social networks

We consider the spread maximization problem that was defined by Domingos and Richardson (2001, 2002) [7] and [22]. In this problem, we are given a social network represented as a graph and are required to find the set of the most “influential” individuals that by introducing them with a new technology, we maximize the expected number of individuals in the network, later in time, that adopt the new technology. This problem has applications in viral marketing, where a company may wish to spread the rumor of a new product via the most influential individuals in popular social networks such as Myspace and Blogsphere.The spread maximization problem was recently studied in several models of social networks (Kempe et al. (2003, 2005) [14] and [15], Mossel and Roch (2007) [20]). In this short paper we study this problem in the context of the well studied probabilistic voter model. We provide very simple and efficient algorithms for solving this problem. An interesting special case of our result is that the most natural heuristic solution, which picks the nodes in the network with the highest degree, is indeed the optimal solution.

Research highlights► We consider the problem of maximizing the spread of influence in social networks that behave like the voter model. ► We give exact and approximation algorithms for the spread maximization problem.