A Fuzzy Social Network Analysis Method and a Case Study on Tianya Tourism Forum in China

Social networking service (SNS) has become online service platforms that focus on facilitating the building of social networks among people who share interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections, and has had a rapid development in China in the past few years. This paper aims to develop a fuzzy social network service analysis method, which combines graph-theory with related fuzzy approach, to analyze the social network structural features and the distribution characteristics of interpersonal nodes in SNS community. A case study on a very famous Chinese tourism BBS – Tianya is conducted to illustrate and validate the proposed approach. The research findings are: 1) the attraction degrees of various areas in the forum are significantly different; 2) interpersonal nodes in the forum are concentrated relatively; 3) the fuzzy out-degrees and the fuzzy indegrees of interpersonal nodes in the forum conflict with each other; 4) the distribution of interpersonal nodes is influenced by geographical relations. These findings can directly support social network service management and particularly tourism online service developments.