Characteristics and evolution of content popularity and user relations in social networks

Social networks have changed the characteristics of the traditional Web and these changes are still ongoing. Nowadays, it is impossible to design valid strategies for content management, information dissemination and marketing in the context of a social network system without considering the popularity of its content and the characteristics of the relations among its users. By analyzing two popular social networks and comparing current results with studies dating back to 2007, we confirm some previous results and we identify novel trends that can be utilized as a basis for designing appropriate content and system management strategies. Our analyses confirm the growth of the two social networks in terms of quantity of contents and numbers of social links among the users. The social navigation is having an increasing influence on the content popularity because the social links are representing a primary method through which the users search and find contents. An interesting novel trend emerging from our study is that subsets of users have major impact on the content popularity with respect to previous analyses, with evident consequences on the possibility of implementing content dissemination strategies, such as viral marketing¹.