In recent years, online social networks have become an important site for companies to promote
their latest products. Consequently, evaluating how many clients are affected by preferential
information distributed in online social networks has become essential. In this paper, a novel
dynamic model called the follower super forwarder client (FSFC) model is proposed to address
the spreading behavior of preferential information in online social networks. The mean field
theory is adopted to describe the formulas of the FSFC model and the key parameters of the
model are derived from the past forwarding data of the preferential information. The edge
between a large-degree node to a small-degree node has a greater weight. In addition, two
kinds of infection probabilities are adopted for large-degree node forwarders and small-degree
node forwarders. To evaluate the performance of the FSFC model, preferential data published on
the Sina microblog (http://www.weibo.com) for the Vivo smartphone, Alibaba?s Tmall shopping
site, and the Xiaomi phone were selected as real cases. Simulation results indicate that the
relative errors of the output of the FSFC model compared with the actual data are 0.0068%
(Vivo smartphone), 0.0085% (Tmall), and 0.032% (Xiaomi phone), respectively. The results
verify that the FSFC model is a feasible model for describing the spreading behavior of
preferential information in online social networks.
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