Behavior Variations and Their Implications for Popularity Promotions: From Elites to Mass on Weibo

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences
• Communication Studies
• Computational Social Science

Background:

• Social media's growth necessitates understanding user influence on content popularity.
• Distinguishing behavior between influential elites and mass users is crucial for communication.
• Limited research addresses how user/content variations impact popularity across domains.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze behavior variations among user groups across diverse content domains on social media.
• To investigate how these variations influence content popularity.
• To propose individualized strategies for enhancing social media content reach.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of user behavior on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform.
• Examination across seven distinct content domains.
• Categorization of users into five distinct groups, analyzing both elite and mass perspectives.

Main Results:

• Elites share more diverse content, including video links.
• Mass users cultivate retweeters with higher loyalty.
• Diverse content does not consistently increase retweets; elites should focus on follower count, masses on loyalty.

Conclusions:

• User behavior on social media varies significantly across different content domains and user types.
• Individualized strategies are more effective than universal principles for social media popularity.
• Understanding elite vs. mass dynamics offers new avenues for content promotion.