Discovery of repost patterns by topic analysis in enterprise social networking

摘要

Purpose - An increasing number of users are inspired by enterprises to repost social media messages, which greatly contributes to the dissemination of such messages in an online social network. The purpose of this paper is to discover the repost patterns of users regarding enterprise social media messages to help enterprises improve information management abilities for social media. Design/methodology/approach - This paper proposes a novel method to discover the repost patterns of users in enterprise social networking (ESN) at the macro-level through topic analysis. Specifically, it proposes the message-diversity metric to measure the latent topic diversity degree of the social media messages. Through this technique, the paper analyzes the message-diversity characteristics of the enterprise social media messages and then explores the repost patterns of users. Findings - The experimental results show that a high repost rate is more prominent for the messages with diverse latent topics, where message-diversity is as high as 0.5. Practical implications - The findings have great potential in several management areas, such as employing social media marketing, predicting popular messages, helping enterprises strengthen their online presence, and gathering more potential customers. Originality/value - This study explores how the repost patterns of users in ESN can be determined through general macro-level behavior of users instead of their micro-level processes. The patterns can also lead to a deeper understanding of which contents can drive people to diffuse information. This study gives an important insight into the information behavior of social media users for enterprise management researchers.