Triadic Closure, Homophily, and Reciprocation: An Empirical Investigation of Social Ties Between Content Providers

In social media, ties between content providers as an organic recommendation mechanism enable users to explore content. A provider can initiate outgoing ties to other providers to cross-promote their content. On receiving the incoming ties, these responding providers then decide whether to reciprocate. Confirming that reciprocation is beneficial for the initiator to attract more subscribers, we find that the reciprocation benefit is negatively moderated by content similarity between the two providers and their common ties with other providers, although both content similarity and common ties increase reciprocation probability. Specifically, a 10% increase in content similarity decreases the reciprocation benefit by 27.2%, and one additional common tie reduces the reciprocation benefit by 12.6% on average. Therefore, providers can take different networking strategies for different objectives. New providers aiming for more reciprocations can initiate ties to providers with similar content or more common ties, whereas well-established providers can reach out to providers with fewer common ties to gain subscribers or to providers with similar content to grow views. To maximize the expected benefit of integrating both reciprocation probability and benefit, a provider should link to more content-similar providers among those with few common ties and more content-different providers among those with many common ties.