Workshop presentation at #msm2012 and #www2012 conference about "Understanding co-evolution of social and content networks on Twitter".

1. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Understanding co-evolution of social and
content networks on Twitter
Philipp Singer, Claudia Wagner, Markus Strohmaier
Knowledge Management Institute and Know Center
Graz University of Technology, Austria
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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2. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Motivation
 Social media applications allow users to share
content and sozialize
  Many social links and a lot of content
 Value of social media application depends on how it
is used – i.e., activity of users
 Which factors impact users‘ content-related activities
(e.g., hashtagging or link usage) and users‘ social
activities (i.e., following)?
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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3. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Aim
 Explore bi-directional longitudinal influence patterns
between social and content properties
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 Sample research questions
 Does growth of a user's followers increase the number of authored
tweets?
 Does an increase of used URLs of users also increases their usage
of hashtags?
 …
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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4. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
?
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Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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5. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Experimental Setup
• Twitter Dataset
 1,500 random users chosen from public timeline
 30 days time period (15.03.2011 – 14.04.2011)
 Measure users’ social and content-related activities daily
 Use social and content properties to describe and
abstract those activities
 Approach
 Monitor and analyze how users‘ social activities and content-related
activities (and related outcomes) co-evole over time (Wang and
Groth 2010)
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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6. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Methodology
 Multilevel autoregressive modeling
 Predict future outputs based on past outputs
 Variables are measured at different levels
 Coefficients can vary from user to user
 Overall coefficients determine influence between
properties over time
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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7. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Does growth of a user's followers increase the
number of authored tweets?
?
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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8. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Does an increase of used URLs of users also
increases their usage of hashtags?
?
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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9. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
?
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?
? ?
?
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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10. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Conclusions
 Driven by social factors
 Attention of other users motivates individuals
 Social media hosts can adopt and use these
techniques
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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11. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Limitations & Next Steps
 One small random Twitter dataset
  Apply techniques to further, larger datasets
 Limited to some chosen properties
  Produce different networks
 Hashtag co-occurrence
 Similarity networks
 Try different model approaches
 Analyze interface changes (e.g., recommender)
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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12. TU Graz - Knowledge Management Institute
Social properties influence content properties
but not vice versa!
Thanks for your attention!
@ph_singer
@clauwa
@mstrohm
philipp.singer@tugraz.at
Philipp Singer 17.04.2012
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