Exploring Centralities of An Online Community

As the internet has been used widely, many online communities have been appeared. Initially, many users used online communities for communication and information sharing. Recently, users start using online communities for building, maintaining, and extending social networks which they did in offline environments previously. The importance of online community is considered by many scholars and also companies to use it strategically. Therefore many studies have focused on exploring characteristics of online communities. Most of them have emphasized the importance of online community. Few study focuses on dynamics within online community. By using social network analysis (SNA), this study tries to explore dynamics of online community. Specially, By measuring the centrality of online community and tracing its changes, this study investigates how the relationships among participants in online communities have been changed over the time. Findings of this study indicate that, as participants has joined in an online community over the time, an opinion leader is appeared, and her/his power is changed