A study on factors impacting popularity of content in Sina Weibo from a cross media perspective

Online social networks provide a promising content dissemination platform. The information diffusion in content centric online social networks has been involving more and more media types. This paper reports on a quantitative study exploring how cross media influence the content dissemination in Sina Weibo (a popular Twitter-like microblogging site in China). Implicit cross media related features are extracted for correlation analysis, which revealed that the variety of multimedia embodied in the content is positively associated with the popularity of the content, and the interaction required multimedia gain more attraction than others. These findings could potentially help to predict the crowd focus in social networks.