Collective attention to social media evolves according to diffusion models

Abstract

We investigate patterns of adoption of 175 social media services and Web businesses using data from Google Trends. For each service, we collect aggregated search frequencies from 45 countries as well as global averages. This results in more than 8.000 time series which we analyze using economic diffusion models. The models are found to provide accurate and statistically significant fits to the data and show that collective attention to social media grows and subsides in a highly regular manner. Regularities persist across regions, cultures, and topics and thus hint at general mechanisms that govern the adoption of Web-based services.