I admit I am a nerd for doing this but my boyfriend is starting a band and I am excited to see how his success plays out. I love tracking numbers and social media is a gold mine for numbers to track.
Data Collection Method:
I started sampling his band’s instagram follower count every few minutes or hours for the past 23 days. I would collect and save the data for data entry by taking time stamped screenshots of the account. I would then enter the data from every screenshot into a Microsoft excel table with the exact date, time, and follower count.
Disclaimer: I want to share this data because I am proud of my plot and I am surprised by the results. I am not sharing this data to promote my boyfriend’s band. For data traceability and transparency ONLY, the band I have been sampling data from is cobaltmountain on instagram.
Reading my plot:
Sorry for forgetting to add a legend. The blue points are follower count samples over time. The red points represent when a post was posted to their account. I added a linear model trend line to the plot and the equation of that line is posted on the plot. Forgive me if the trend line model could have been made more accurate using more advanced data analysis methods. I still have lots to learn about fitting lines to sampled data.
Expectations vs. Reality:
With something like social media growth, especially with inconsistent posting times, I expected my plot to show more erratic behavior with more periods of low growth and more sharp increases in follower count around posting times. However, the band’s instagram following has been steadily increasing by about 31 followers every day. I am interested to see if this steady growth continues or if there will be more variation in the future.
It makes me wonder more about how the social media algorithms function. I have not heard of other people experiencing such linear and predictable growth on social media. In Instagram analytics the data is displayed in such a way that it does not look incredibly linear. If more people did their own third part analytics would they see similar predicable growth? I am very intrigued by these results. I look forward to gathering more data in the future.
Data Advice:
I am also interested in seeing if I can use this data to help them boost their growth. Does anyone have any interesting ideas of additional social media metrics that I can sample and plot that will help me uncover interesting and potentially useful trends?
Thank you for enjoying my data with me. It feels like showing off a special collection of things but just more digital.
by TheMegaSlow