Impact of Multimedia in Sina Weibo: Popularity and Life Span

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This work provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. Our preliminary study shows that multimedia tweets dominant pure text ones in Sina Weibo. Multimedia contents boost popularity of tweet as well as users. Users who tend to publish many multimedia tweets are also productive with text tweet. Finally, we demonstrate that tweets with multimedia contents survive longer than text tweets. Our research demonstrates the impact of multimedia in Sina Weibo with respect to how it affects the popularity, life span of tweets and the popularity of user. The results could be leveraged by social-media-based marketing and decision-making.