Significance of likes: Analysing passive interactions on Facebook during campaigning.

Mohammad Adib Khairuddin,Asha Rao,Gaoxi Xiao

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0179435

Mohammad Adib Khairuddin, Asha Rao + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179435

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Abstract

With more and more political candidates using social media for campaigning, researchers are looking at measuring the effectiveness of this medium. Most research, however, concentrates on the bare count of likes (or twitter mentions) in an attempt to correlate social media presence and winning. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Interaction Strength Plot (IntS) to measure the passive interactions between a candidate’s posts on Facebook and the users (liking the posts). Using this method on original Malaysian General Election (MGE13) and Australian Federal Elections (AFE13) Facebook Pages (FP) campaign data, we label an FP as performing well if both the posting frequency and the likes gathered are above average. Our method shows that over 60% of the MGE13 candidates and 85% of the AFE13 candidates studied in this paper had under-performing FP. Some of these FP owners would have been identified as popular based on bare count. Thus our performance chart is a vital step forward in measuring the effectiveness of online campaigning.

Highlights

Many researchers have used the number of likes and twitter mentions as a means of determining the popularity of candidates in an election campaign
Plotting the interactions between the posts and the users presents an overview of the online campaigning performance of the candidates, in particular of the campaign activities posted on their Facebook Page (FP)
For passive IntS (P_IntS)(31) (P_IntS(likes)), 0 is the substituted value for observed outcomes whenever the number of likes acquired by the FP is at least 31

Summary

Introduction

Many researchers have used the number of likes and twitter mentions as a means of determining the popularity of candidates in an election campaign. As our analysis will show, a wellperforming FP should be defined as one that consistently demonstrates increasing and positive interactions by regularly posting at least the average number of posts for the day, with these posts gathering at least the average number of likes for the day. We believe that this ranking would be a much better indicator of the performance of an FP in campaigning than just the bare count of likes gathered

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