Understanding the behaviors of information propagation is essential for the effective exploitation of social influence in social networks. However, few existing influence models are both tractable and efficient for describing the information propagation process and quantitatively measuring social influence. To this end, in this paper, we develop a linear social influence model, named Circuit due to its close relation to the circuit network. Based on the predefined four axioms of social influence, we first demonstrate that our model can efficiently measure the influence strength between any pair of nodes. Along this line, an upper bound of the node(s)' influence is identified for potential use, e.g., reducing the search space. Furthermore, we provide the physical implication of the Circuit model and also a deep analysis of its relationships with the existing methods, such as PageRank. Then, we propose that the Circuit model provides a natural solution to the problems of computing each single node's authority and finding a set of nodes for social influence maximization. At last, the effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated on the real-world data. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that Circuit model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can greatly alleviate the computation burden of the influence maximization problem.