Predicting the Growth of Official Facebook Pages of Korean News-Media: Based on a Network Analysis Using the Population Ecology Model

Abstract

This research tried to predict the growth of official Facebook pages of Korean news-media. Especially, it applied the Lotka-Volterra equation traditionally used for population ecology studies in biology to Korean news-media Facebook pages. We assumed that competition exists between two official news-media Facebook pages when identical Facebook users post ‘Like’s’ on both Facebook pages. We collected and analyzed more than 260 million ‘Like’s’ for two years from July 2014. Also, for the stronger robustness of the result, we tested nine different combinations of measures of ‘expected maximum size of Facebook page’(or ‘carrying capacity’in population ecology terms) and ‘observed maximum size of Facebook page’. All nine results revealed very strong statistical significance and large practical significance: the correlation coefficient ranged from 0.64 to 0.93 with p-values less than 0.001.