A correlation analysis of web social media

In this paper we analyze and compare three popular content creation and sharing websites, namely Panoramio, YouTube and Epinions. This analysis aims in advancing our understanding of Web Social Media and their impact, and may be useful in creating feedback mechanisms for increasing user participation and sharing. For each of the three websites, we select five fundamental factors appearing in all content centered Web Social Media and we use regression analysis to calculate their correlation. We present findings of statistically important correlations among these key factors and we rank the discovered correlations according to the degree of their influence. Furthermore, we perform analysis of variance in distinct subgroups of the collected data and we discuss differences found in the characteristics of these subgroups and how these differences may affect correlation results. Although we acknowledge that correlation does not imply causality, the discovered correlations may be a first step towards discovering causality laws behind content contribution, commenting and the formulation of friendship relations. These causality laws are useful for boosting the user participation in social media.