Online Social Communities

Social communities helps people to interact and engage both socially and cognitively. Direct and indirect relationships are built through these interactions with the members in the community. The members may be known, unknown, friends or relatives. With the invent of Web 2.0, Internet users were empowered with the ability to interact, share content and collaborate over the dynamic web pages. The evolution of technologies has helped the transition from offline to Online Social Communities (ONSC). Social interaction also got transformed within communities encouraging both offline and online connect. In this chapter, a comprehensive review of ONSC is done. First, the ONSC dimensions-user relationships, social interaction, common interests and virtual environments along with OSNC features-purpose, membership, rules and terms, user generated content, users-benefits and types are discussed in detail. Types of communities for ONSC are given based of three different school of thoughts. Second, the importance of ONSC management—user acquisition, user engagement and user retention, across different user participation life cycle stages—initial, growth, matured and decline, which is further mapped to user membership involvement phases, is given. Various perspectives, recommender systems and user engagement tools for ONSC are also included. A survey of ONSC structure detection techniques of disjoint and overlapping communities for both static and dynamic network structures is done. Finally, the applications of ONSCs across various domains are explained. The summary of popular ONSC available till date and supported businesses flourishing based on ONSCs are explicitly mentioned.

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