Sharing Smarter: How Platform Choice Shapes Responses to Your Posts

Figure 1: When people undertake activities they care about, they often log them and share them with others.

People connect with each other through social media, often by sharing what they are doing or what matters to them. For example, bouldering enthusiasts might post about their weekend climbs, while creatives share paintings or music pieces they’ve been working on.

With the prevalence of digital technology, these moments are often captured through various means. Personal tracking tools record metrics like heart rate, calories burned, or time spent exercising, while creatives use photos, screenshots, or recordings to visually showcase their work — whether it’s a work-in-progress or the finished product.

Once captured, these materials are shared on social platforms. These might be general social media platforms used for everyday communication, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, or niche platforms tailored to specific activities like Github (for programming), Soundcloud (for music), or Letterboxd (for reading). While both types of platforms provide online spaces for sharing, they often foster vastly different kinds of social engagement. When deciding where to share, one might ask: “If I’m seeking encouragement, where should I post my daily running log? What if I want direct feedback on my artwork?”

In this project, we explore the outcomes people experience when sharing their activities online. Specifically, we examine how a platform’s “content diversity” and the way users edit or frame their posts can influence the responses they receive.

Let’s begin by looking at the types of platforms we focus on —

What do we mean by “Content Diversity”? Why does it matter?

Figure 2: Categorization of social platforms based on their content diversity. Dedicated, or low-diversity platforms, support sharing content within a single domain or among a few related domains. Conversely, broad-purpose platforms tend to have high diversity of content, supporting sharing many kinds of activities on the platform.

Platforms that support social engagement and sharing can vary greatly in their design. This includes differences in the modalities they support (e.g., text, images, or video) and the formats of interaction they offer (e.g., posting on a social feed or live video streaming). Among the many dimensions of platform design, one key factor is content diversity — the topical focus a platform supports for sharing.

A broad-purpose platform allows users to share a wide variety of content with diverse audiences. However, this openness can raise privacy concerns and make it difficult to gauge others’ interests. In contrast, a dedicated platform fosters connections among like-minded individuals and may offer tailored support or feedback for specific activities. However, such platforms can also create social comparisons and pressure, potentially leading to tension or even a loss of motivation.

The degree of content diversity on a platform also influences the customization or editing options for shared content. While all platforms support general forms of customization, dedicated platforms may enable domain-specific editing. For example, a physical activity app might allow users to seamlessly import self-tracking data and share it as an infographic.

As people navigate various platforms to share their activities, how do content diversity and editing features impact their sharing experiences? What outcomes do these design elements influence?

Study — How content diversity and editing impact response outcome

To understand how a platform’s content diversity and the use of editing features influence the responses users receive, we conducted a study using real-world social media data.

We focused on two domains of commonly shared activities (physical activity, creative work) and identified two dedicated platforms for each domain (Strava, MapMyRun for physical activity; Dribbble, Behance for creative work) to collect data. All selected platforms supported social feeds, enabling users to interact through posting, liking, and commenting. Importantly, many users on these platforms cross-posted their activity to Twitter, our chosen broad-purpose platform for this study. This allowed us to collect pairs of activity-sharing posts from both types of platforms and compare the outcomes of their sharing. Using Twitter’s now-discontinued Academic API and additional data scraping, we gathered over 700,000 pairs of activity-sharing posts spanning seven years (2015–2022), along with engagement metrics such as likes and comments. Our analysis examines this dataset both quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on the volume and textual quality of responses received.

The power of customizing your post and sharing on a dedicated platform

Our results revealed that dedicated platforms (those which are low in content diversity) and the use of editing features not only increased the likelihood of receiving responses but also enhanced the quality of engagement. Specifically, users were more likely to receive likes, comments, a greater number of unique commenters, and a higher chance of engaging in conversations.

Figure 3: Qualitative differences of comments received from platforms with different content diversity and across activity domains.

Regarding the positivity (emotional valence) and relatedness (topical relevance) of comments, we found that comments on dedicated platforms excelled in both aspects. As shown in Figure 3, comments generated on dedicated platforms across both domains exhibited higher emotional valence scores, indicating that audiences on these platforms tended to use more positive language.

We also observed greater topical relevance in comments received on dedicated platforms. Table from Figure 3 highlights the most distinct words used across platforms with varying levels of content diversity. In addition to words with high positivity valence used, it also reveals that users on dedicated platforms could be more focused and specific when providing comments. People more often mention aspects of the activity, such as “presentation”, “illustration”, “color” for creative work, or “pace”, “ride” for physical activity.

Domain and platform norms DO matters

While our findings highlight the strong effects of platform type and editing features, our study also uncovers nuanced interactions between domain, platform, and making edits. For example, we found that embedding photos in physical activity posts increased the likelihood of receiving a response on broad-purpose platforms. However, on dedicated platforms, the same feature led to a greater overall volume of responses. Similarly, customizing text significantly boosted both the likelihood and volume of responses on dedicated platforms for physical activity. In contrast, for creative work sharing, text customization had a stronger effect on broad-purpose platforms.

These results suggest that the impact of editing features varies across platforms and domains. We suspect this variation arises from differences in platform and domain norms, shaped by content diversity. For instance, in the physical activity domain, sharing often revolves around self-tracked data, particularly on dedicated platforms. Adding context through photos or descriptive text can complement the quantified results, potentially explaining why editing features are especially effective on dedicated platforms for physical activity.

What does this mean for design and research?

The interplay between a platform’s content diversity, editing features, and its domain offers valuable insights for future platform design and research. Given that dedicated platforms help users receive more responses, social platform designers might consider creating features that foster and support dedicated communities, aligning with users’ motivations to connect more deeply within specific domains.

While our findings reaffirmed that editing shared content increases engagement, the impact varied depending on the platform’s content diversity and the domain. This highlights the importance of platform- and domain-specific norms in shaping sharing outcomes. Moreover, these findings suggest that editing features can help users align their posts with platform or community norms. Features like templates or guided prompts could further support users in optimizing their content, ultimately leading to better and more meaningful engagement.

For more details and full description of the research context, methods, findings, and discussions, please refer to our paper, archived and presented at the 27th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) held at San José, Costa Rica on November 9–13, 2024.

Reference

Dennis Wang, Jocelyn Eng, Mykyta Turpitka, and Daniel A. Epstein. 2024. Exploring Activity-Sharing Response Differences Between Broad-Purpose and Dedicated Online Social Platforms. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2, Article 359 (November 2024), 37 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686898

• GPT-4o via ChatGPT by OpenAI was used to assist with drafting and refining text for this post. All content was reviewed and edited for accuracy and originality by the authors.
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