  Influence Maximization is an extensively-studied problem that targets at
selecting a set of initial seed nodes in the Online Social Networks (OSNs) to
spread the influence as widely as possible. However, it remains an open
challenge to design fast and accurate algorithms to find solutions in
large-scale OSNs. Prior Monte-Carlo-simulation-based methods are slow and not
scalable, while other heuristic algorithms do not have any theoretical
guarantee and they have been shown to produce poor solutions for quite some
cases. In this paper, we propose hop-based algorithms that can easily scale to
millions of nodes and billions of edges. Unlike previous heuristics, our
proposed hop-based approaches can provide certain theoretical guarantees.
Experimental evaluations with real OSN datasets demonstrate the efficiency and
effectiveness of our algorithms.
