Finding Twitter communities with common interests using following links of celebrities

One important problem in target advertising and viral marketing on online social networking sites is the efficient identification of com-munities with common interests in large social networks. Existing methods involve large scale community detection on the entire so-cial network before determining the interests of individuals within these communities. This approach is both computationally inten-sive and may result in communities without a common interest. We propose an efficient approach for detecting communities that share common interests on Twitter. Our approach involves first identify-ing celebrities that are representative of an interest category before detecting communities based on linkages among followers of these celebrities. We also study the characteristics of these communities and the effects of deepening or specialization of interest