Effect of Media Usage Selection on Social Mobilization Speed: Facebook vs E-Mail
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Wang-2015-Effect of Media Usag.pdf
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Author(s)
Wang, Jing
Li, Xitong
Alstott, Jeff
Velu, Chander
Madnick, Stuart E.
Date Issued
September 2015
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Wang, Jing, Stuart Madnick, Xitong Li, Jeff Alstott, and Chander Velu. “Effect of Media Usage Selection on Social Mobilization Speed: Facebook Vs E-Mail.” Edited by Tobias Preis. PLoS ONE 10, no. 9 (September 30, 2015): e0134811.
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Final published version
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.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134811
