Increasing User Participation: An Exploratory Study of Querying on the Facebook and Twitter Platforms

Participatory applications frequently rely upon a crowd–sourced community of users who contribute data and content to deliver a service. The success or failure of participatory applications is dependent on developing and maintaining a community of responsive users. This paper reports the results of an exploratory 30–day study examining user responsiveness to query messages. In total 3,055 check–in requests were sent via the online social networks Facebook or Twitter to 70 participants who were randomly recruited using a chain referral process, wherein existing users recruited others to participate