Exploring Text Virality in Social Networks

This paper aims to shed some light on the concept of virality - especially in social networks - and to provide new insights on its structure. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being spread, rather than to the influencers who spread it, (b) virality is a phenomenon with many facets, i.e. under this generic term several different effects of persuasive communication are comprised and they only partially overlap. To give ground to our claims, we provide initial experiments in a machine learning framework to show how various aspects of virality can be independently predicted according to content features

Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?

Reactions to textual content posted in an online social network show different dynamics depending on the linguistic style and readability of the submitted content. Do similar dynamics exist for responses to scientific articles? Our intuition, supported by previous research, suggests that the success of a scientific article depends on its content, rather than on its linguistic style. In this article, we examine a corpus of scientific abstracts and three forms of associated reactions: article downloads, citations, and bookmarks. Through a class-based psycholinguistic analysis and readability indices tests, we show that certain stylistic and readability features of abstracts clearly concur in determining the success and viral capability of a scientific article.Comment: Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012), 4-8 June 2012, Dublin, Irelan

Exploring Image Virality in Google Plus

Reactions to posts in an online social network show different dynamics depending on several textual features of the corresponding content. Do similar dynamics exist when images are posted? Exploiting a novel dataset of posts, gathered from the most popular Google+ users, we try to give an answer to such a question. We describe several virality phenomena that emerge when taking into account visual characteristics of images (such as orientation, mean saturation, etc.). We also provide hypotheses and potential explanations for the dynamics behind them, and include cases for which common-sense expectations do not hold true in our experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. IEEE/ASE SocialCom 201

Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion

Predicting Successful Memes using Network and Community Structure

We investigate the predictability of successful memes using their early spreading patterns in the underlying social networks. We propose and analyze a comprehensive set of features and develop an accurate model to predict future popularity of a meme given its early spreading patterns. Our paper provides the first comprehensive comparison of existing predictive frameworks. We categorize our features into three groups: influence of early adopters, community concentration, and characteristics of adoption time series. We find that features based on community structure are the most powerful predictors of future success. We also find that early popularity of a meme is not a good predictor of its future popularity, contrary to common belief. Our methods outperform other approaches, particularly in the task of detecting very popular or unpopular memes.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Proceedings of 8th AAAI Intl. Conf. on Weblogs and social media (ICWSM 2014

What Makes Content Viral Online: A Study of Micro Blogs on Sina Weibo

Social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter and Sina Weibo have attracted millions of users and it makes social interaction become important and frequent in people’s daily life. They enjoy sharing Weibo posts with their friends. However, different posts gain different levels of attention. Why are certain contents on SNSs more viral than others? This question has attracted many researchers. Our research aims to examine what makes online contents viral on Sina Weibo. We find that if a Sina Weibo post is featuring with ease of engagement by users, or visual effect, or new knowledge, then it is more viral than other posts. Otherwise, we concluded several popular kinds of engagement from Sina Weibo: moral encouragement (e.g. good luck from micro-blogs forwarding), material reward (e.g. lucky draw) and topic discussion (e.g. product design; seeking for resonance; emotional appeal). Choosing suitable kind to manage online content can help enterprises operate Weibo marketing much better

Modelling opinion misperception and the emergence of silence in online social system

In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of the real distribution of opinions or beliefs about a given topic. In this work we explore the mechanisms giving rise to opinion misperception in social media groups, which are larger than physical ones and have peculiar topological features. By means of numerical simulations, we suggest that the structure of connections of such communities plays indeed a role in distorting the perception of the agents about others' beliefs, but it is essentially an indirect effect. Moreover, we show that the main ingredient that generates the misperception is a spiral of silence induced by few, well connected and charismatic agents, which rapidly drives the majority of individuals to stay silent without disclosing their true belief, leading minoritarian opinions to appear more widespread throughout the community.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. To be submitted soo