Identifying Different Types of Social Ties in Events from Publicly Available Social Media Data

Tie strength is an essential concept in identifying different kind of social ties - strong ties and weak ties. Most present studies that evaluated tie strength from social media were carried out in a controlled environment and used private/closed social media data. Even though social media has become a very important way of networking in professional events, access to such private social media data in those events is almost impossible. There is very limited research on how to facilitate networking between event participants and especially on how to automate this networking aspect in events using social media. Tie strength evaluated using social media will be key in automating this process of networking. To create such tie strength based event participant recommendation systems and tools in the future, first, we need to understand how to evaluate tie strength using publicly available social media data. The purpose of this study is to evaluate tie strength from publicly available social media data in the context of a professional event. Our case study environment is community managers’ online discussions in social media (Twitter and Facebook) about the CMAD2016 event in Finland. In this work, we analyzed social media data from that event to evaluate tie strength and compared the social media analysis based findings with the individuals’ perceptions of the actual tie strengths of the event participants using a questionnaire. We present our findings and conclude with directions for future work.