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10

Behavior Analytics

What motivates individuals to join an online group? When individuals

abandon social media sites, where do they migrate to? Can we predict

box office revenues for movies from tweets posted by individuals? These

questions are a few of many whose answers require us to analyze or predict

behaviors on social media.

Individuals exhibit different behaviors in social media: as individuals or

as part of a broadercollective behavior. Whendiscussing individual behav-

ior, our focus is on one individual.Collective behavioremerges when a

population of individuals behave in a similar way with or without coordi-

nation or planning.

In this chapter we provide examples of individual and collective behav-

iors and elaborate techniques used toanalyze,model, andpredict, these

behaviors.

10.1 Individual Behavior

We read online news; comment on posts, blogs, and videos; write reviews

for products; post; like; share; tweet; rate; recommend; listen to music; and

watch videos, among many other daily behaviors that we exhibit on social

media. What are the types of individual behavior that leave a trace on social

media?

We can generally categorize individual online behavior into three cate-

gories (shown in Figure10.1):

1. User-User Behavior.This is the behavior individuals exhibit with
   respect to other individuals. For instance, when befriending someone,
   sending a message to another individual, playing games, following,
   inviting, blocking, subscribing, or chatting, we are demonstrating a
   user-user behavior.

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