Application of a Community Membership Life Cycle Model on Tag-Based Communities in Twitter

Social networks are the backbone of Web 2.0. More than 500 million users are part of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, discussion boards or other virtual online communities. In this work we report on a first empirical study of the conceptional community membership life-cycle model of (Sonnenbichler, A Community Membership Life Cycle Model, Sunbelt XIX International Social Network Conference, University of California, San Diego, USA, 2009) applied on message data from the micro-blogging service Twitter. Based on hash tags we analyze ad-hoc communities of Twitter and we operationalize the roles of the conceptional model with the help of activity-levels and the local interaction structure of community members. We analyze the development of roles over the life-time of the community. Our explorative analysis supports the existence of the roles of the conceptional model and is a first step towards the empirical validation of the model and its operationalization. The knowledge of a community’s life-cycle model is of high importance for community service providers, as it allows to influence the group structure: Stage transitions can be supported or harmed, e.g. to strengthen the binding of a user to a site and keep communities alive.