סמינר בניהול טכנולוגיה ומערכות מידע

Abstract

The success of social media websites—Web 2.0 platforms that enable users to communicate among themselves—hinges on users’ ability to generate content and respond to content supplied by others. Thus, understanding the current and expected patterns of participation among users is a fundamental concern in social media. I offer a novel approach for estimating the number of active users and predicting future participation. I gradually build models that incorporate past participation levels and social interactions and demonstrate, using a unique data set from online forums, that they can significantly outperform current prevailing methods in assessing participation patterns. Moreover, in line with existing literature, the analysis identifies various drivers of participation in social media and captures different participation patterns among distinguished online-communities types.