When Do People Expect More Likes and Comments on Facebook and From Whom?
Published on February 24, 2017.
Despite the fact that social media has been around for over a decade now, we still know reletively little about people's expectations for getting attention and responses from their online friends. In this work we examine the often overlooked end of the attention ``transaction'': the content producer's expectation to be heard. This study offers both a conceptual framework for thinking about feedback expectations and a computational model that can be used in practice. Our conceptual framework describes the factors affecting expectations for getting feedback from friends and family, and the implications for the individual of fulfilling those expectations. By combining surveys and observational data analysis we provide evidence for the relation between observed behaviors and expectations. We also show that the fulfillment of expectations contributes to people's sense of connectedness to their friends, an important outcome for individuals' well being (see Burke, Marlow & Lento 2010; Kivran-Swaine, Ting, Brubaker, Teodoro & Naaman 2014). In addition, our simple and easily portable predictive models demonstrate how the expectations of content producers can be incorporated in recommendation systems in practice, a necessary step towards building less ego-centric recommendation systems for the consumption of social content.
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