  Online social networks have become incredibly popular in recent years, which
prompts an increasing number of companies to promote their brands and products
through social media. This paper presents an approach for identifying
influential nodes in online social network for brand communication. We first
construct a weighted network model for the users and their relationships
extracted from the brand-related contents. We quantitatively measure the
individual value of the nodes in the community from both the network structure
and brand engagement aspects. Then an algorithm for identifying the influential
nodes from the virtual brand community is proposed. The algorithm evaluates the
importance of the nodes by their individual values as well as the individual
values of their surrounding nodes. We extract and construct a virtual brand
community for a specific brand from a real-life online social network as the
dataset and empirically evaluate the proposed approach. The experimental
results have shown that the proposed approach was able to identify influential
nodes in online social network. We can get an identification result with higher
ratio of verified users and user coverage by using the approach.
