Characterization of Cross-posting Activity for Professional Users across Facebook, Twitter and Google+

Abstract

Professional players in social media (e.g., big companies, politician, athletes, celebrities, etc) are intensively using Online Social Networks (OSNs) in order to interact with a huge amount of regular OSN users with different purposes (marketing campaigns, customer feedback, public reputation improvement, etc). Hence, due to the large catalog of existing OSNs, professional players usually count with OSN accounts in different systems. In this context an interesting question is whether professional users publish the same information across their OSN accounts, or actually they use different OSNs in a different manner. We define as cross-posting activity the action of publishing the same information in two or more OSNs. This paper aims at characterizing the cross-posting activity of professional users across three major OSNs, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To this end, we perform a large-scale measurement-based analysis across more than 2M posts collected from 616 professional users with active accounts in the three referred OSNs. Then we characterize the phenomenon of cross posting and analyze the behavioral patterns based on the identified characteristics.