How to Compare Different Social Media: A Conceptual and Technical Framework

Abstract

Social media research has gained traction during the last 10 years within Internet research and digital sociology. However, due to methodological and technical difficulties studies have mainly focused on analyzing only one platform per study (often Twitter or Facebook), especially when the study involves analysis of large public or private data streams (e.g., Bechmann. J Media Bus Stud 11(1):21–38, 2013; Bechmann. Managing the interoperable self. In: Bechmann A, Lomborg S. The ubiquitous internet: user and industry perspectives. Routledge, New York, pp 54–73, 2015; Boyd and Marwick. Social privacy in networked publics: teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies. In: Proceedings of a decade in internet time, 21–24 September 2011, University of Oxford, 2011; Fernandes et al. Mass Commun Soc 13(5):653–675, 2010; Marichal. First Monday, 12(2), 2013; Lotan et al. Int J Commun 5:1375–1405, 2011; Wu et al. Who says what to whom on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2011), pp 705–714, 2011; Bruns and Burgess. J Stud 13:801–814, 2012). The fact that such data streams are accessed through different application programming interfaces (APIs) that have their own different logics means that complexity increases at a technical level.

However, this chapter argues that addressing such technical complexities also requires looking at issues at the sociological and conceptual level. How do different social media, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, fundamentally differ? By addressing not only the different social and relational logics but also linking them to processes of data retrieval and analysis, the chapter aims to contribute with new insights into the fundamental character of two seemingly related social media and address questions which need to be posed in order to make solid and comparative academic analyses in the future.

More specifically, we develop a framework for the analysis of use and relations across social media, combining a theoretical, a conceptual, a methodological, and a technical approach. We identify challenges and suggest a specific technical implementation that we in the end evaluate. Technically, we focus on Facebook, Instagram, and to a certain extent Twitter, but we argue that our framework can be easily expanded to encompass other social media. The main argument in the chapter is that bridging is not an easy task as several challenges occur on different levels that the researchers need to account for in greater details. First, in the technical infrastructure and/or database structure relations are simple but represent many different complex sociological relationships and interaction types. Second, the elements of social media as accounted for need to be translated socially. Third, when we study user-centric social media use, we increase complexity in at least two different dimensions, we propose a mixed method design and we propose a cross-service approach.