The dynamics of publishing of posts and comments on facebook (the russian segment, the first five months of 2013)

TL;DR

This study analyzes posting and commenting behaviors on the Russian Facebook segment in early 2013, revealing anomalies and proposing a formal, hierarchical approach to structure social media data for comparative analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a universal, formal method for structuring social media data hierarchically, enabling cross-platform analysis and comparison.

Findings

Detected a significant anomaly in user posting rates.

Analyzed basic social media characteristics for cross-platform comparison.

Proposed a formal hierarchical approach to organize social media data.

Abstract

The article presents a study of some characteristics of post and comment publishing in the Russian segment of Facebook. A number of non-trivial results has been obtained. For example, a significant anomaly has been detected in the number of user accounts with the rate of publishing posts of approximately two posts per three days. The analysis has been carried out at the level of basic characteristics that are shared by most social media platforms. It makes possible a direct comparison of obtained results with data from other platforms. The article presents an approach to formalization and ordering of structural and informational elements on social media platforms. The approach is based on the representation of these structural elements in the form of a coherent hierarchy of container objects and their relations. This method allows to structure and analyze raw data from different social media platforms in a unified algorithmic design. The described approach is more formal, universal and constructive than other known approaches.