  Mining topical experts on social media is a problem that has gained
significant attention due to its wide-ranging applications. Here we present the
first study that combines data from four major social networks -- Twitter,
Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, along with the Wikipedia graph and internet
webpage text and metadata, to rank topical experts across the global population
of users. We perform an in-depth analysis of 37 features derived from various
data sources such as message text, user lists, webpages, social graphs and
wikipedia. This large-scale study includes more than 12 billion messages over a
90-day sliding window and 58 billion social graph edges. Comparison reveals
that features derived from Twitter Lists, Wikipedia, internet webpages and
Twitter Followers are especially good indicators of expertise. We train an
expertise ranking model using these features on a large ground truth dataset
containing almost 90,000 labels. This model is applied within a production
system that ranks over 650 million experts in more than 9,000 topical domains
on a daily basis. We provide results and examples on the effectiveness of our
expert ranking system, along with empirical validation. Finally, we make the
topical expertise data available through open REST APIs for wider use.
