The article explains the challenge of estimating true audience size on social media and introduces the Lincoln Index as a statistical tool to address this. It uses probability theory and simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. The Lincoln Index is not only relevant in social media but is also applied in ecology and tech industries.
The Statistical Theory Behind Why Your Instagram Posts Have So Few Likes
A handy trick to count uncountable things — from Instagram clout, to penguin population and Man City fans in North London
We have all experienced the disappointment of putting effort into our Instagram posts, only to receive a minimal number of likes. But how can you measure your true social media reach, your Internet clout?
The Lincoln-Peterson index — or how to count uncountable things
Let’s say you make an Instagram post on a private account of 300 followers and receive 40 likes. You know your audience is somewhere between 40 and 300. Fortunately, there is a neat method called the Lincoln Index that allows us to estimate the total audience.
A simulation
At different values of like rates, the Lincoln estimates remain unbiased, while the naive estimate underestimates our social reach by a lot.
As usual, all good statistics come with some caveats:
What is this counting method useful for? This statistical technique is very popular in ecology and is also common in Tech companies, where we want to estimate certain metrics before release or in a social media platform.
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