Behavior Analysis in Social Media

W ith the rise of social media, information sharing has been democratized. As a result, users are given opportunities to exhibit different behaviors such as sharing, posting, liking, commenting, and befriending conveniently and on a daily basis. By analyzing behaviors observed on social media, we can categorize these behaviors into individual and collective behavior. Individual behavior is exhibited by a single user, whereas collective behavior is observed when a group of users behave together. For instance, users using the same hashtag on Twitter or migrating to another social media site are examples of collective behavior. User activities on social media generate behavioral data, which is massive, expansive, and indicative of user preferences, interests, opinions, and relationships. This behavioral data provides a new lens through which we can observe and analyze individual and collective behaviors of users. The emergence of this new type of data presents behavior analysis on social media with new challenges. We detail first what individual and collective behavior analysis is, and then outline novel challenges with future work.