The importance of being socially-savvy: quantifying the influence of social networks on microblog retrieval

Social media users create virtual connections for various reasons: personal and professional. While significant research efforts have been spent on exploring the dynamics of creation of social network connections, little is known about how those connections influence the content generated by social media users. In this work, we quantitatively evaluate the influence of social networks on social media content providers. Additionally, we propose several document expansion methods, which leverage the content generated by the social networks of the authors of social media documents and compare their effectiveness. Experimental results on a large sample of Twitter data indicate that retrieval models discriminatively leveraging social network content for document expansion outperform both traditional, socially-unaware retrieval models and retrieval models that indiscriminatively utilize all social connections.