Comparative Evaluation of Cyber Migration Factors in the Current Social Media Landscape

Abstract

In the last decade, social media experienced a dramatic increase in terms of quantity and variety of available platforms, in addition to an exponential growth in the number of users. Recent reports show that social media have a total of almost 2.5 billion active users, that is, about 71% of Internet users have at least one account on social media. At the beginning of the social media era, the word "cyber Migration" emerged to represent and describe a new phenomenon: users switching between one social network platform to another. Several studies investigated the different reasons and factors behind cyber migration, and tried to identify patterns. In this paper, we analyze how the concept of cyber migration evolved over the last decade, and we evaluate whether the model can still be applied to nowadays' social media landscape. To this end, we use the push-pull-mooring framework, a well-known model in economics domain, to address the technological and human factors that affect switching behavior. Specifically, we investigate the dynamics of cyber migration in relation to the types of social network and digital media platforms (e.g., personal, professional, video sharing, and other categories).