The social environment of a person has a high influence of his or her consumer behaviour. Social networks transfer these social environments to the online world and enable a targeted influence on the customers purchasing behaviour by word of mouth from their social contacts. With the rapid spread of social networks and the increasing resistance to conventional advertising, companies have to dev...

With the exponential growth of online social network services such as Facebook and Twitter, social networks and social medias become more and more important, directly influencing politics, economics, and our daily life. Mining big social networks aims to collect and analyze web-scale social data to reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors. It is an inherently interdisciplinary academic...

Introduction The World Wide Web is witnessing an explosion in new forms of online communities enabled by advances in user-created content, social networks and by leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds (Porter 2004). These advances are empowering online communities to move from mere discussion fora to viable, valuegenerating organizations or value networks. Value networks are composed of individuals or...

of the Dissertation Encouraging User Engagement with Online Social Networks Online social network operators are interested in promoting use of their sites, because usage translates to revenue. In this work, we investigate how various factors in online social network user behavior correlates with the users’ lifetimes in the online social networks. Many of the primary results are perhaps expected...