A Comparative Temporal Analysis of User-Content-Interaction in Social Media

How long does content published via online social networks and media receive attention? We derive a novel definition of content lifetime from the temporal distribution of user-content interactions and apply it to a comparative study of multiple traditional and modern online social media. This characterization of lifetime is not only relevant for learning about human behavior on social media; when designing an experiment on social media data that involves temporal quantization, it can assist in making a principled choice of interval size. We find that across all media, interactions take place on four main time scales: short term activity of at most 15 minutes, medium term activity in the range of one hour and two days, respectively, and long term activity of two weeks or more.