Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay

8 Pages Posted: 8 Feb 2011

See all articles by Sitaram Asur

Sitaram Asur

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto

Bernardo A. Huberman

CableLabs

Gabor Szabo

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto

Chunyan Wang

Stanford University - Department of Applied Physics

Date Written: February 5, 2011

Abstract

Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become temporal trends which are displayed to users. The question of what factors cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not been answered yet. In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing trends.

Suggested Citation

Asur, Sitaram and Huberman, Bernardo A. and Szabo, Gabor and Wang, Chunyan, Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay (February 5, 2011). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1755748 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1755748

Sitaram Asur

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto ( email )

1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94301
United States

Bernardo A. Huberman (Contact Author)

CableLabs ( email )

400 W California Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
United States

Gabor Szabo

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto ( email )

1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94301
United States

Chunyan Wang

Stanford University - Department of Applied Physics ( email )

CA
United States

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