Popularity Evolution of Professional Users on Facebook

Abstract

Popularity in social media is an important objective for professional users (e.g. companies, celebrities, and public figures, etc). A simple yet prominent metric utilized to measure the popularity of a user is the number of fans or followers she succeed to attract to her page. Popularity is influenced by several factors which identifying them is an interesting research topic. This paper aims to understand this phenomenon in social media by exploring the popularity evolution for professional users in Facebook. To this end, we implemented a crawler and monitor the popularity evolution trend of 8k most popular professional users on Facebook over a period of 14 months. The collected dataset includes around 20 million popularity values and 43 million posts. We characterized different popularity evolution patterns by clustering the users temporal number of fans and study them from various perspectives including their categories and level of activities. Our observations show that being active and famous correlate positively with the popularity trend.