CHI Paper: Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites
Moira Burke at al. from facebook studied what led new users to post more over time—in terms of feedback from those how saw their posts, how broadly they were distributed, etc. They counted what happened over someone’s first two weeks on facebook and predicted what would happen over the next 3 months. They considered variables such as how many photos the newcomer posted, how many photos of theirs were tagged, how many were commented, how often they were tagged in a photo, and how many were put in friends’ feeds. This paper reports which variables influenced eventual engagement. For example, gettting tagged even once was assoicated with a 7% increase in long-term photosharing by initially unengaged newcommers.