Abstract
The continual launches of new online social media that meet the most varied people’s needs are resulting in a simultaneous adoption of different social platforms. As a consequence people are pushed to handle their identity across multiple platforms. However, due the to specialization of the services, people’s identity and behavior are often partial, incomplete and scattered in different “places”. To overcome this identity fragmentation and to give an all-around picture of people’s online behavior, in this paper we perform a multidimensional analysis of users across multiple social media sites. Our study relies on a new rich dataset collecting information about how and when users post their favorite contents, about their centrality on different social media and about the choice of their username. Specifically we gathered the posting activities and social sites usage from Alternion, a social media aggregator.The analysis of social media usage shows that Alternion data reflect the novel trend of today’s users of branching out into different social platforms. However the novelty is the multidimensional and longitudinal nature of the dataset. Having at our disposal users’ degree in five different social networks, we performed a rank correlation analysis on users’ degree centrality and we find that the degrees of a given user are scarcely correlated. This is suggesting that the individuals’ importance changes from medium to medium. The longitudinal nature of the dataset has been exploited to investigate the posting activity. We find a slightly positive correlation on how often users publish on different social media and we confirm the burstiness of the posting activities extending it to multidimensional time-series. Finally we show that users tend to use similar usernames to keep their identifiability across social sites.
Highlights
In the last decade large datasets describing online social networks (OSNs) have been made available together with an extensive literature which enabled a comprehensive description of OSNs
We discovered that the posting activity on online social media is bursty and highly heterogeneous
Social media aggregators allow users to combine their own identities into a single profile by gathering their online activities from different social platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and many others
Summary
In the last decade large datasets describing online social networks (OSNs) have been made available together with an extensive literature which enabled a comprehensive description of OSNs. It is becoming evident that individuals are used to express their sociality through multiple layers ranging from face-to-face and on-phone communications to a variety of online social networks. In their online life, users have access to a wide portfolio of social platforms which allow them to differentiate their interests and convey diverse contents. The diversification in the usage of the social platforms, in conjunction with their specialization, is causing a fragmentation of users’ identities among diverse social media This process of identity fragmentation makes the understanding of the online behaviors more difficult since data are split and need to be matched and fused
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