Everyday the Same Picture: Popularity and Content Diversity
This research addresses how content diversity affects popularity on social media platforms, providing insights for understanding user engagement patterns, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies of online behavior.
The study investigated the relationship between content diversity and popularity on Facebook by analyzing a page that posted the same picture daily, comparing it with science and conspiracy news pages. They analyzed about 2 million likes and 190,000 comments from around 340,000 and 65,000 users, respectively, and introduced a model to mimic user selection preferences based on content heterogeneity.
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.