Author Platforms as a Key Trend in the Development of Social Networks

Abstract

The article investigates the data from a regular study of an active audience of social networks in Russia for October 2020. We analyze data on social networks VKontakte, Instagram, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok. The data includes audience size, age and gender of authors. We focus on an active (writing) audience, exploring social media as a means of public communication that influences public opinion. To isolate data by country for each social network, we consider the percentage of geo-identification: we divide the number of posts with geographic data by the percentage of posts with geodata. Likewise, for authors.

As a result, we identified social networks with the highest growth in active audience in 2020 — Instagram, YouTube and TikTok — and formulated their development trends. We analyzed and ranked the authors most engaging in communication, interpreting engagement as the sum of likes, reposts and comments in the author's account for September 2021. For the top three fastest growing social networks, we analyzed the content of the three most popular authors.