How to become an Influencer in Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become part of our everyday life, as a means of interacting with people, sharing content, attending events, etc. Influencers are professional OSN users, who have a large loyal audience and use the OSNs to market various goods or services based on brand partnerships. In this paper, we introduce a novel mechanism to enable OSN users to become influencers by strategically deciding their activity within the OSN. Initially, the concepts of social coordinates and social communities are proposed. Then, a non-cooperative game is introduced to enable the users to make optimal decisions regarding their activity in the OSN in order to become part of an influencers' social community and enjoy the benefit of additional followers. We show that the non-cooperative game is an exact potential game with at least one Nash Equilibrium and we introduce a distributed algorithm to determine its Nash Equilibrium. A detailed set of numerical results, based on real data extracted from Instagram, show the pure operation and performance of the proposed framework, as well as the impact of the social coordinates on the users' decisions. Also, a real-life case study is presented to show the applicability of the proposed framework in Instagram.