A Survey on Social Media Influence Environment and Influencers Identification

Social media users can be influenced directly by their close relationships, such as their friends, family, and colleagues. They can also be influenced by those who follow them through shared information, goals, news, and opinions. Generally, an influencer is someone who entices an influence to do the same action, make the same decision, or change their behavior. He can also communicate information, ideas, and thoughts to multiple users. There are many tools to identify influencers. It can not be found simply through their big follower number or their shared media number. Thus, influencer identification is one of the essential tasks in social media research. Several approaches and metrics have been proposed in the literature to identify influencers. In this article, we explored the issue of identifying social media influencers while providing a generic view of social media influence. First, we presented a literature synthesis on the influence of social media. Then, we categorized the works and illustrated the leading solutions in literature to identify influencers in social media. A discussion and suggestions for potential future directions in this area accompanied this presentation. We believe these briefings are critical to resolving the issue discussed in this article.