Most liked, fewest friends: Patterns of enterprise social media use

Abstract

Enterprise social media can provide visibility of users' actions and thus has the potential to reveal insights about users in the organization. We mined large-scale social media use in an enterprise to examine: a) user roles with such broad platforms and b) whether people with large social networks are highly regarded. First, a factor analysis revealed that most variance of social media usage is explained by commenting and 'liking' behaviors while other usage can be characterized as patterns of distinct tool usage. These results informed the development of a model showing that online network size interacts with other media usage to predict who is highly assessed in the organization. We discovered that the smaller one's online social network size in the organization, the more highly assessed they were by colleagues. We explain this inverse relationship as due to friending behavior being highly visible but not yet valued in the organization. Copyright © 2014 ACM.