Everyday the Same Picture: Popularity and Content Diversity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how content diversity influences popularity on Facebook by analyzing user engagement with various pages, including a unique case where a page posts the same picture daily, and proposes a model of user content preferences.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of content heterogeneity and popularity, and presents a model simulating user content selection based on heterogeneity.

Findings

Content heterogeneity correlates with different popularity patterns.

Users show distinct engagement behaviors across science, conspiracy, and homogeneous content pages.

A model of user preferences accounts for content heterogeneity in content selection.

Abstract

Facebook is flooded by diverse and heterogeneous content, from kittens up to music and news, passing through satirical and funny stories. Each piece of that corpus reflects the heterogeneity of the underlying social background. In the Italian Facebook we have found an interesting case: a page having more than $40K$ followers that every day posts the same picture of a popular Italian singer. In this work, we use such a page as a control to study and model the relationship between content heterogeneity on popularity. In particular, we use that page for a comparative analysis of information consumption patterns with respect to pages posting science and conspiracy news. In total, we analyze about $2M$ likes and $190K$ comments, made by approximately $340K$ and $65K$ users, respectively. We conclude the paper by introducing a model mimicking users selection preferences accounting for the heterogeneity of contents.