Reciprocal nature of social capital in Facebook: an analysis of tagging activity

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how we can understand social media interactions better by explicating the process of social capital formation on Facebook from a reciprocity perspective.

This study observed users who got tagged on Facebook by his/her friends and how s/he responded to that tagging activity. In total, 4,666 posts and 418,580 comments from The New York Times Facebook page were collected for the observation.

A majority (77.87 percent) of users who were tagged by their friends showed reactions to their tagging. In detail, 33.63, 44.20, and 0.04 percent of users responded by comments, “Likes”, and “Shares”, respectively. In total, 90.11 percent of the comments and 98.58 percent of the “Likes” were expressed on a comment or sub-comment, and only 9.89 percent of the comments and 1.42 percent of the “Likes” were expressed on a post. This indicates that a high percentage of users respond to their tagging notification, and they prefer dialogic responses to non-dialogic responses.

Previous studies have focused on photo tagging activity in social media, but user tagging activity had not been studied enough. This study examines the effects of Facebook tagging activity from a reciprocal perspective.