Achieving and maintaining important roles in social media

Abstract

International audience ; A significant problem common for di↵erent domains of applications is an issue of obtaining and keeping an influential position in the respective social media society. In this paper a new approach is proposed based on the analysis of roles of users in groups identified within society. Three di↵erent dimensions of user behavior are considered as key elements of these roles: their activity, influence and cooperativeness/competition. Taking into account measures describing these dimensions, a set of roles characterizing behaviors of users in groups is formulated. We propose an original set of roles with their justification in sociological models, develop an easy extendable model of a social system and conduct experiments to allow us to define patterns describing stability and variability of given roles as well as statistics of transitions in time between these considered roles. To define the roles, we took into account di↵erent features of user interactions, both quantitative and qualitative. We propose an integrated approach to the analysis of role changes in the context of group evolution. We consider behavior of users in groups with di↵erent sizes and di↵erences between them. We also analyse the stability of individual roles players by users in groups and often occurring transitions between individual roles. The obtained results, interpreted also from the sociological point of view, allow the formulation of general recommendations on which behaviors of users could ensure achieving and maintaining influential roles in social media. The most frequent patterns of transitions between roles are identified and significant similarities between them for two considered blog portals are described. The approaches and methods of analysis presented in the paper may be applied to support decisions leading to obtaining and maintaining influential positions in social media, which may be useful for the promotion of goods and services, leading business or political campaigns.