Abstract
Social media has become an integral part of today’s web and allows communities to share content and socialize. Understanding the factors that influence how communities evolve over time - for example how their social network and their content co-evolve - is an issue of both theoretical and practical relevance. This paper sets out to study the temporal co-evolution of microblog messages’ content and social networks on Twitter and of forum-messages’ content and social networks induced from communication behavior of users from an online forum called Boards.ie and bi-directional influences between them by using multilevel time series regression models. Our findings suggest that social networks have a stronger influence on content networks in our datasets over time than vice versa, and that social network properties, such as Twitters users’ in-degree or Boards.ie users’ reply behavior, strongly influence how active and informative users are. While our investigations are limited to three small datasets obtained from Twitter and Boards.ie, our analysis opens up a path towards more systematic studies of network co-evolution on social media platforms. Our results are relevant for researchers and community managers interested in understanding how content-related and social behavior of social media users evolve over time and which factors impact their co-evolution.
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Singer, P., Wagner, C., Strohmaier, M. (2012). Factors Influencing the Co-evolution of Social and Content Networks in Online Social Media. In: Atzmueller, M., Chin, A., Helic, D., Hotho, A. (eds) Modeling and Mining Ubiquitous Social Media. MUSE MSM 2011 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7472. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33684-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33684-3_3
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