Modeling of Information Sharing on the Business Social Media

Abstract

Social media, which support communication on the Internet, continue to spread rapidly. SNSs and micro-blogs are typical services. This research proposes methods for efficient information sharing through social media, especially intra-firm systems for information sharing of research or expertise. In this research, a simple model of social media is provided, whose users share information by directly referring to other users. The authors focused on a particular intra-firm social media and analyzed the usage of its communities. By applying a clustering method, they are classified into six groups and analyzed their characteristics and occupation rate. Finally, the authors proposed a method that supports information sharing and evaluated it by agent-based simulation using our proposed model. The authors clarified that not only encouraging users to post articles but also giving them an opportunity to refer to the existing community' s history is effective for information sharing.