This is clearly a case of Social Network Analysis and modelling. Research more in that direction and get ur answers. Granovetter and Valente are quite cast authors in this regard.
For the novelty, I think a possibility is the promorank framework (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237532476_Promotion_Analysis_in_MultiDimensional_Space). You can set a small subspace and add the temporal info.
Article Promotion Analysis in MultiDimensional Space