Which factors affect the duration of hot topics on social media platforms?

Jinlou Zhao (), Hongyu Gao (), Yongli Li () and Jiaguo Liu ()
Additional contact information
Jinlou Zhao: Harbin Engineering University
Hongyu Gao: Harbin Engineering University
Yongli Li: Northeastern University
Jiaguo Liu: Harbin Engineering University

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2017, vol. 51, issue 5, No 28, 2395-2407

Abstract: Abstract Hot topics, as a common phenomenon on social media platform, play a major role in public opinion. This paper aims to discuss the issues about the duration of hot topics: which factors influence the duration of a hot topic on a social media platform? To answer this question, Cox regression model of survival analysis was introduced to make empirical analysis. The survey data containing 60 hot topics from 2011 to 2013 was collected from a popular social media platform of China. Besides, model verification is implemented to validate the adopted model and the calibrated parameters. As a result, this paper finds that the number of participants and opinion leaders have a significant positive influence on an incident’s duration, and official response times have a significant negative impact; whereas, the number of attending media has no significant impact. Furthermore, the prediction accuracy in the validation is up to 85 %, which implies that the obtained results would be robust. The established model and the designed empirical analysis are demonstrated to be adaptable to analyze the duration of hot topics, and three factors are found to effect the duration of a hot topic based on our collected dataset. Our analytic method could also be adopted in numerous problems related to the duration issues in the field of information management.

Keywords: Hot topics; Social media platforms; Survival analysis; Cox regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11135-016-0395-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:qualqt:v:51:y:2017:i:5:d:10.1007_s11135-016-0395-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-016-0395-1

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().