Information Spread Over an Internet-mediated Social Network: Phases, Speed, Width, and Effects of Promotion

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how promotion affects the speed and width of information spread on social networks, identifying three distinct phases of story popularity and providing empirical data for improving web-based information dissemination.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed empirical analysis of information diffusion phases and the impact of promotion, offering insights for designing better web-based communication strategies.

Findings

Three phases of story popularity: Expansion, Front-page, Saturation

Promotion accelerates spread and extends reach beyond initial network

Width of spread remains relatively stable across phases

Abstract

In this study, we looked at the effect of promotion in the speed and width of spread of information on the Internet by tracking the diffusion of news articles over a social network. Speed of spread means the number of readers that the news has reached in a given time, while width of spread means how far the story has travelled from the news originator within the social network. After analyzing six stories in a 30-hour time span, we found out that the lifetime of a story's popularity among the members of the social network has three phases: Expansion, Front-page, and Saturation. Expansion phase starts when a story is published and the article spreads from a source node to nodes within a connected component of the social network. Front-page phase happens when a news aggregator promotes the story in its front page resulting to the story's faster rate of spread among the connected nodes while at the same time spreading the article to nodes outside the original connected component of the social network. Saturation phase is when the story ages and its rate of spread within the social network slows down, suggesting popularity saturation among the nodes. Within these three phases, we observed minimal changes on the width of information spread as suggested by relatively low increase of the width of the spread's diameter within the social network. We see that this paper provides the various stakeholders a first-hand empirical data for modeling, designing, and improving the current web-based services, specifically the IT educators for designing and improving academic curricula, and for improving the current web-enabled deployment of knowledge and online evaluation of skills.