Repository logo
 

Effect of Media Usage Selection on Social Mobilization Speed: Facebook vs E-Mail.


Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Wang, Jing 
Madnick, Stuart 
Li, Xitong 
Alstott, Jeff 

Abstract

Social mobilization is a process that enlists a large number of people to achieve a goal within a limited time, especially through the use of social media. There is increasing interest in understanding the factors that affect the speed of social mobilization. Based on the Langley Knights competition data set, we analyzed the differences in mobilization speed between users of Facebook and e-mail. We include other factors that may influence mobilization speed (gender, age, timing, and homophily of information source) in our model as control variables in order to isolate the effect of such factors. We show that, in this experiment, although more people used e-mail to recruit, the mobilization speed of Facebook users was faster than that of those that used e-mail. We were also able to measure and show that the mobilization speed for Facebook users was on average seven times faster compared to e-mail before controlling for other factors. After controlling for other factors, we show that Facebook users were 1.84 times more likely to register compared to e-mail users in the next period if they have not done so at any point in time. This finding could provide useful insights for future social mobilization efforts.

Description

Keywords

Adult, Aged, Communications Media, Electronic Mail, Female, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, Proportional Hazards Models, Social Behavior, Social Media, Young Adult

Journal Title

PLoS One

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1932-6203
1932-6203

Volume Title

10

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)