Studying Diffusion of Viral Content at Dyadic Level

TL;DR

This study investigates how viral content spreads at the dyadic level in social networks, revealing that stronger relationships and higher centrality in dyads facilitate diffusion, thus supporting recent theories on influence dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a dyadic-level analysis of viral diffusion, providing empirical evidence that relationship strength and network centrality influence information spread.

Findings

Dyads with stronger relationships are more likely to facilitate diffusion.

Higher centrality of the receiver correlates with increased viral spread.

Sender authority centrality significantly impacts diffusion success.

Abstract

Diffusion of information and viral content, social contagion and influence are still topics of broad evaluation. As theory explaining the role of influentials moves slightly to reduce their importance in the propagation of viral content, authors of the following paper have studied the information epidemic in a social networking platform in order to confirm recent theoretical findings in this area. While most of related experiments focus on the level of individuals, the elementary entities of the following analysis are dyads. The authors study behavioral motifs that are possible to observe at the dyadic level. The study shows significant differences between dyads that are more vs less engaged in the diffusion process. Dyads that fuel the diffusion proccess are characterized by stronger relationships (higher activity, more common friends), more active and networked receiving party (higher centrality measures), and higher authority centrality of person sending a viral message.