HybridRank: Ranking in the Twitter Hybrid Networks

User influence in social media may depend on multiple modes of communication. Research has identified the importance of a hybrid network on Twitter, comprising of the follower, retweet and mention networks. HybridRank is an extension of PageRank which considers all three networks. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of 8K Twitter users, we evalu-ated the performance of HybridRank and predicted the in-fluence of users. We used the number of times that a user was retweeted or mentioned as a proxy for influence. Hy-bridRank outperforms a (good) baseline method for men-tions outside the focal user’s follower network, as well as for novel mentions (users who have not mentioned the focal user in the past)