The data I would be most interested to see (if you plan to do further research on this) is of when people started following the page (rather than overall numbers of followers). I believe you mentioned this briefly in the limitations footnote.
A lot of people follow a lot of pages, and may have followed something years ago. If their interests change, but the page doesn’t post, it seems relatively unlikely that someone will go out of their way to unfollow it. Perhaps they’ve even forgotten that they’ve followed it to begin with!
That was my first thought (intuition, no evidence) when you mentioned that the correlation between followers and date since last post was steeper when organisations that have not posted in the last 2 months were removed, i.e. this cuts out the ‘followed this years ago and forgot, no new posts to remind me’ followers.
I would love to do that. Maybe I’ll learn more data stuff, because I want to be able to scrub data so I can get more of it, faster. Any idea if that sort of data is even public?
I agree with you on engagement. It would be good to get better data on that, because number of followers is probably quite a poor proxy for engagement. Numbers of views, likes and comments are probably far better.
The data I would be most interested to see (if you plan to do further research on this) is of when people started following the page (rather than overall numbers of followers). I believe you mentioned this briefly in the limitations footnote.
A lot of people follow a lot of pages, and may have followed something years ago. If their interests change, but the page doesn’t post, it seems relatively unlikely that someone will go out of their way to unfollow it. Perhaps they’ve even forgotten that they’ve followed it to begin with!
That was my first thought (intuition, no evidence) when you mentioned that the correlation between followers and date since last post was steeper when organisations that have not posted in the last 2 months were removed, i.e. this cuts out the ‘followed this years ago and forgot, no new posts to remind me’ followers.
I would love to do that. Maybe I’ll learn more data stuff, because I want to be able to scrub data so I can get more of it, faster. Any idea if that sort of data is even public?
I agree with you on engagement. It would be good to get better data on that, because number of followers is probably quite a poor proxy for engagement. Numbers of views, likes and comments are probably far better.