Exploring Engagement in a 'Social Crowd' on Twitter

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’16 Companion, February 27–March 02, 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA ACM 978-1-4503-3950-6/16/02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2869112 Abstract People use Twitter to communicate with companies and friends, and ask for or share information. Here, we explore participation and engagement in an information-gathering ‘social crowd’. We first present a study of engagement behavior through both Twitter Ads and direct outreach, and find that direct outreach achieves a higher engagement rate. Second, by showing people other users’ participation with a shared interest, we explore the potential for engagement of social crowds. We demonstrate the benefit to engagement of sharing social context, present a preliminary step towards deeper studies on the social component of engagement, and suggest directions for understanding and supporting social crowd engagement.