Identifying the most influential communities on the dissemination of information on social networks

Many people receive and adopt ideas and opinions using their connections in social networks, which facilitate accessibility and spreading of information. Homophily in interests speeds up the adoption of the information spreading process. Communities provide a coarse grain representative of network users with common interests. Here, we address the effects of community structures on the virality of information in social networks. We use real data sets of the Twitter network, and we show that in many viral hashtags, some communities characterized by a high ratio of inter-connections to intra-connection have appeared at the initial stages of meme adaptation. We show that the adoption of a hashtag in these communities can cause the attention of a broader audience, and this can cause virality. This result suggests that the spreading of an idea can be boosted up if that opinion implants in these communities and these communities adopt the idea.