purpose: the paper aims to build an index model for measuring microblog users' influence by taking microbloggers of sina weibo as a research sample.
design/methodology/approach: our user infl uence index model emphasizes link analysis and user actions in the microblog network. we conduct experiments to investigate the performance of our model by using data crawling from sina weibo.
findings: the user influence is correlated to the attention that the user has received from his or her audience, the user's activities and his or her tweets' influence. experimental results show that our model can reflect microbloggers' influence in a more reasonable way.
research limitations: more factors need to be considered to identify different influential users at different time periods.
practical implications: the results of the study provide us with insights into both the way to measure microblog users' influence and the way to rank users based on their influence.
originality/value: by combining link analysis and user actions, this index model can reduce the impact of dummy follower accounts on user influence, reflecting a user's real influence in the microblog system.

purpose: the paper aims to build an index model for measuring microblog users' influence by taking microbloggers of sina weibo as a research sample.
design/methodology/approach: our user infl uence index model emphasizes link analysis and user actions in the microblog network. we conduct experiments to investigate the performance of our model by using data crawling from sina weibo.
findings: the user influence is correlated to the attention that the user has received from his or her audience, the user's activities and his or her tweets' influence. experimental results show that our model can reflect microbloggers' influence in a more reasonable way.
research limitations: more factors need to be considered to identify different influential users at different time periods.
practical implications: the results of the study provide us with insights into both the way to measure microblog users' influence and the way to rank users based on their influence.
originality/value: by combining link analysis and user actions, this index model can reduce the impact of dummy follower accounts on user influence, reflecting a user's real influence in the microblog system.