Effect of Media Usage Selection on Social Mobilization Speed: Facebook vs E-Mail

PLoS One. 2015 Sep 30;10(9):e0134811. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134811. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Social mobilization is a process that enlists a large number of people to achieve a goal within a limited time, especially through the use of social media. There is increasing interest in understanding the factors that affect the speed of social mobilization. Based on the Langley Knights competition data set, we analyzed the differences in mobilization speed between users of Facebook and e-mail. We include other factors that may influence mobilization speed (gender, age, timing, and homophily of information source) in our model as control variables in order to isolate the effect of such factors. We show that, in this experiment, although more people used e-mail to recruit, the mobilization speed of Facebook users was faster than that of those that used e-mail. We were also able to measure and show that the mobilization speed for Facebook users was on average seven times faster compared to e-mail before controlling for other factors. After controlling for other factors, we show that Facebook users were 1.84 times more likely to register compared to e-mail users in the next period if they have not done so at any point in time. This finding could provide useful insights for future social mobilization efforts.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Communications Media*
  • Electronic Mail
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Proportional Hazards Models
  • Social Behavior*
  • Social Media*
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

The authors were partially funded by the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholarship Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of PRC (No. 71328103), and by the MIT John Norris Maguire Professorship in Information Technologies Chair account. Langley Castle Hotel funded the awards for the contest used in this study and gathered the data. Other than this, the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.