College students on Weibo: Do they behavior differently?

In recent years, online social networking has become an essential part of daily lives for all Internet users, which in turn provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand user behaviors in a window much wider than the physical world. As an active group on Weibo, college students have long been the research topic in various academic domains. Most of the previous studies, however, focused on only some universities by the way of questionnaire, and the difficulty in correctly identifying students online impedes us from knowing more about them. In this paper, with the help of a complete set of Weibo tweets with college tags, we apply thorough analytics to the online behavioral patterns of college students. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time we make use of complete Weibo data for this purpose. We are mainly concerned with the interesting topics about the college students such as the spatio-temporal behavioral patterns, the social intensities, the real discursive power of different universities, and so on. We believe our study can help to gain more profound understandings of college students and provide valuable insights into modern university management and Internet construction.