Toward Building of Visualization Method to Highlight Top Users’ Trends in Social Networks

Abstract

Social media plays an essential role in people’s daily life. It is prevalent among the young generation. Social media applications, such as Microblog Sina Weibo, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, are occupying significant positions in social connection and human being communication. Social media applications, like Weibo, provide the function of publishing, viewing, commenting, and sharing information. They also provide a platform for people to freely express their true feelings and opinions about the events through comment, retweets, and thumbs up. Information transmission on Weibo is real time, timely, and continuous, which helps track public interest and attitudes on a particular topic. Based on the information transmission on these similar social media networks, the sense of time, space, and strangeness between publishers and audiences is eliminated. Using information visualization can make the public opinions in social networks clearly show. The layered display composed of flower graph, radar graph, and pie chart allows users to have an in-depth understanding of popular trends from comprehensive to detailed. We choose Sina Weibo and 5G themes as visualization examples to demonstrate visualization methods applicable to all social media networks. We used a questionnaire survey to evaluate our visualization model. The analysis result shows that the model is creative, accurate, and easy to understand. In the end, the Social Network Public Emotion Information Visualization Model (SNPEIVM) is put forward.