Title: Comparison of two local social media services in Finland and China by social network analysis

Authors: Tingan Tang; Matti Hämäläinen

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalto University School of Science, Konemiehentie 2, 02150, Espoo, Finland ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalto University School of Science, Konemiehentie 2, 02150, Espoo, Finland

Abstract: Social network analysis has been widely used in characterising user behaviours, social relationships, network evolution and service adoption of social media. However, previous research mostly focused on the famous global large scale social media such as Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter. Comparatively, little research has been done for local social media. In this paper, we compare two similar campus-based social media for exchanging goods and services by social network analysis. We also explore the correlation between different social relationships (e.g., the friend relation and exchanging relation) and different user behaviours (e.g., the requesting and offering) by quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) and Pearson correlation analysis methods. Finally, we discuss our findings and future work.

Keywords: social media services; social network analysis; online communities; virtual communities; web based communities; social exchange; Finland; China; local social media; campus based social media; social relationships; user behaviour; social networking; social networks; university students; universities; higher education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNM.2012.051058

International Journal of Social Network Mining, 2012 Vol.1 No.2, pp.209 - 224

Received: 16 Mar 2012
Accepted: 20 Jun 2012
Published online: 21 Aug 2014 *

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