Patent ID: 8775429

Claim:
A method of analyzing data from an online social network having a set of network users, the network users being capable of communicating with one another through the social network, the method comprising: obtaining messages sent by the network users, the messages having social content that includes at least one of textual terms or images provided by the network users, wherein the messages include a marker of interest in the social content, the marker of interest being actively tagged by a network user for a designated topic of the social network; identifying the network users that sent the messages having the marker of interest in the social content as interested users of the topic, the interested users being a subset of the set of network users; and determining, for the topic, a topic-specific influence (TSI) value of a designated user from the interested users in the subset, wherein the TSI value of the designated user is based on a number of the interested users that are registered to receive the messages from the designated user and who have separately expressed an interest in the topic.