Who will lead and who will follow: Identifying Influential Users in Online Social Networks - A Critical Review and Future Research Directions

Along with the explosive growth of the phenomenon Online Social Networks (OSN), identifying influential users in OSN has received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, the development of practical approaches for the identification of influential users is still in its infancy and researchers face numerous challenges. By means of a structured literature review, we analyze and synthesize the growing number of publications particularly from two perspectives. From a research perspective, we find that existing approaches mostly build on users’ connectivity and activity but hardly consider further characteristics of influential users. Moreover, we outline two major research streams. It becomes apparent that most marketing-oriented articles draw on real-world data of OSN, while more technologyoriented papers rather have a theoretical approach and mostly evaluate their artifacts by means of formal proofs. We find that an even stronger collaboration between the scientific Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) and Marketing community than observed today could be mutually beneficial. With respect to a practitioner’s perspective, we compile advice on the practical application of approaches for the identification of influential users. It is hoped that the results can stimulate and guide future research.