Exploring Image Virality in Google Plus
This work addresses image virality in social networks for researchers and platform designers, but it is incremental as it extends known textual dynamics to visual features.
The study investigated whether visual characteristics of images, such as orientation and saturation, influence virality dynamics in Google+ posts, finding several phenomena and cases where common-sense expectations did not hold.
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.