Determining Response-generating Contexts on Microblogging Platforms

In recent years the study of social media communities has come into the focus of research. One open but central question is which properties stimulate user interaction within communities and thus contribute to community building. In this paper, we provide a first step towards answering this question by identifying features in the Jodel microblogging app that trigger user responses as one form of attention. Jodel is a geographically restricted app that allows users to post threads and comments anonymously. The absence of displayed user information on Jodel makes the posted content the only trigger for user interaction, making the language the one and only means for users to gather contextual implications about their discourse partners. This enhanced function of language promises a revealing baseline investigation into linguistic behavior on social media. To approach this issue, we conducted a sequence of lexico-grammatical analyses and subjected the quantitative results to various statistical tests. While a Principal Component Analysis did not show a significant difference between the grammatical structure of original posts with and without answers, a negative binomial regression model focusing on the interpersonal meta-function yielded significant results. A further analysis of these features correlated to shorter or longer response times showed significant results for the interrogative mood. Additionally, keyword analyses revealed significant differences between posts with answers and without answers. Our study provides a promising first step towards understanding textual features triggering user interaction and thereby community building – an unresolved problem of practical relevance to social network operation.