Incredible growth of the social web over the last decade has created a flurry of new social media sites for the users to choose from. Users with a lack of time and resources to engage on these sites must inevitably choose specific sites among them to remain active on. This choice more often than not leads to user migration, a well studied phenomenon in fields such as sociology and psychology. Users are the valuable assets for any site as they generate revenue and contribute to the growth of the site. Hence, It is essential for social media sites to establish and understand the reasons for user migration to prevent it. In this paper, we investigate whether people migrate, and if they do, how they migrate. We formalize site migration to help identify the migration between popular social media sites and determine clear patterns of migration between sites. This work suggests that it is feasible to study migration patterns. These patterns can help understand social media sites and gauge their popularity to improve business intelligence and revenue generation through the retention of users.
@inproceedings{shamanth2011understanding,
title = {Understanding User Migration Patterns in Social Media},
author = {Shamanth Kumar and Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu},
year = {2011},
keywords = {conference},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
abstract = {Incredible growth of the social web over the last decade has created a flurry of new social media sites for the users to choose from. Users with a lack of time and resources to engage on these sites must inevitably choose specific sites among them to remain active on. This choice more often than not leads to user migration, a well studied phenomenon in fields such as sociology and psychology. Users are the valuable assets for any site as they generate revenue and contribute to the growth of the site. Hence, It is essential for social media sites to establish and understand the reasons for user migration to prevent it. In this paper, we investigate whether people migrate, and if they do, how they migrate. We formalize site migration to help identify the migration between popular social media sites and determine clear patterns of migration between sites. This work suggests that it is feasible to study migration patterns. These patterns can help understand social media sites and gauge their popularity to improve business intelligence and revenue generation through the retention of users.},
url = {http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI11/paper/view/3664},
pdf = {http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/papers/aaai11.pdf},
slides = {slides/migration.pptx},
}