Abstract Background Detection of influential actors in social media such as Twitter or Facebook plays an important role for improving the quality and efficiency of work and services in many fields such as education and marketing. Methods The work described here aims to introduce a new approach that characterizes the influence of actors by the strength of attracting new active members into a networked community. We present a model of influence of an actor that is based on the attractiveness of the actor in terms of the number of other new actors with which he or she has established relations over time. Results We have used this concept and measure of influence to determine optimal seeds in a simulation of influence maximization using two empirically collected social networks for the underlying graphs. Conclusions Our empirical results on the datasets demonstrate that our measure stands out as a useful measure to define the attractors comparing to the other influence measures.
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