Researchers have paid a lot of attention to complex networks in recent decades. Due to their rapid evolution, they turn into a major scientific and innovative field. Several studies on complex networks are carried out, and other subjects are evolving every day such as the challenge of detecting influential nodes. In this study, we provide a brief overview of complex networks, as well as several concepts key related to measurements, the structure of complex network and social influence, an important state of the art on complex networks including basic metrics on complex networks, the evolution of their topology over the years as well as the dynamic of networks. A detailed literature about influential finding approaches is also provided to indicate their strength and shortcomings. We aim that our contribution of literature can be an interesting base of information for beginners’ scientists in this field. At the end of this paper, some conclusions are drawn and some future perspectives are mentioned to be studied as new directions in the future. More detailed references are provided to go further and deep in this area.
Marketing through social networks is a recent approach which consists in using these networks to convince potential consumers with the quality of products or services offered by a company. Marketing is developing very quickly, particularly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc. The major advantage of social networks is the possibility of influencing a panel of people according to their interests but without having the feeling of being guided. Identifying influencers is an interesting topic in social networks, and centrality measures are among the methods used to address this topic. Each measure has some shortcomings. In this paper, we gather centrality measures by using Technology for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method, which is a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) to identify potential influences in a social network. A case study is presented to explain carefully TOPSIS and to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, three real datasets are used for the experiments. The results show that TOPSIS can rank spreaders more accurately than centrality criteria.
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