The Relation between Popularity and Engagement on Facebook

Abstract

IntroductionIn this paper, we will attempt to find factors that encourage content contribution and crowdsourcing on Facebook groups. This platform for information for various topics is very much based on the factor of group members helping and contributing their own knowledge, information and experiences with others, usually strangers in the real life.We know there is the 99:1 rule that many suggest applies for online content contribution, and we can see this in the large majority of Facebook groups as well as any other platform, when a small portion of a given sample of people is the main contributor to the community. However, in some instances we see lurkers start to participate on content contribution. It can be a one-time participation or a gradual move to be a regular contributor. We will try to examine just that and see what are the factors that influence this behavior online.This understanding can lead to the interpretation of future behavior and prediction of it, leading to more productive conversations for users who seek information in groups. We can also hypothesis that those factors can be used on a larger scale by brand pages for user engagement on marketing campaigns. In all these studies we did not find a connection between the amount of friends or connection on SNS to the level of activity and participation. In our own study, we will attempt and analyze patterns in our selected online community and see if we identify motivators for sharing content as well as trying to map the users who contribute in the community as well as the lurkers. Leading to our research questions: what makes a group post attract engagement from other users? And, what is the distribution of lurkers and engaged users in the selected group? We also want to examine whether there is a relationship between amount of friends one has on the network and his likelihood of sharing.6 Research Question and HypothesisAs mentioned, in all the previous studies we have looked into, we did not find a study that looks into the link between the amount of friends or connections on SNS, and specifically Facebook, to the level of activity and participation. In our own study, we will attempt and analyze patterns in our selected online community and see if we identify motivators for sharing content as well as trying to map the users who contribute in the community as well as the lurkers. Leading to our research questions: what makes a group post attract engagement from other users? and, what is the distribution of lurkers and engaged users in the selected group? We also want to examine our main question, whether there is a relationship between amount of friends one has on the network and his likelihood of sharing content or commenting on other posts.The argument of this paper suggests that the engagement of a Facebook user on a certain group is directly correlated to his number of friends on the social network.The assumption is that the higher is the engagement of a user on a group, the higher will be his number of friends. This assumption is base...