Understanding user behavior in online social networks: a survey

TLDR

Online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Foursquare are globally popular, accessed via desktops and mobile devices, and with over a billion users they present a new venue for innovation and pose many research challenges. This survey aims to comprehensively review state‑of‑the‑art research on user behavior in online social networks from multiple perspectives. The survey examines social connectivity, network traffic activity, mobile‑device social behavior, and malicious user behaviors, and discusses detection solutions. The survey provides a systematic exploration of existing research highlights and stimulates further significant research in these areas.

Abstract

Currently, online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Foursquare have become extremely popular all over the world and play a significant role in people¿s daily lives. People access OSNs using both traditional desktop PCs and new emerging mobile devices. With more than one billion users worldwide, OSNs are a new venue of innovation with many challenging research problems. In this survey, we aim to give a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research related to user behavior in OSNs from several perspectives. First, we discuss social connectivity and interaction among users. Also, we investigate traffic activity from a network perspective. Moreover, as mobile devices become a commodity, we pay attention to the characteristics of social behaviors in mobile environments. Last but not least, we review malicious behaviors of OSN users, and discuss several solutions to detect misbehaving users. Our survey serves the important roles of both providing a systematic exploration of existing research highlights and triggering various potentially significant research in these topics.