Quantifying Influence in Social Networks and News Media

Massive numbers of users of social networks share various types of information such as opinions, news, and ideas in real time. As a new form of social network, Twitter is a particularly useful information source. Studying influence can help us better understand the role of social networks. The popularity of social networks like Twitter is primarily measured by the number of followers. The number of followers in Twitter and the number of users exposed to news media are important factors in measuring influence. We chose Twitter and the New York Times as representative media to analyze the influence and present an empirical analysis of these datasets. When the correlation between the number of followers in Twitter and the number of users exposed to the New York Times is computed, the result is moderately high. The correlation between the number of users exposed to the New York Times and the number of sections including the users on it, was found to be very high. We measure the normalized influence score using our proposed expression based on the two correlation coefficients.