Social Media Optimization: Increasing the Network Size of Facebook

1
Quantitative Management Practice
Social media optimisation
Student’s Name
Course
Professor’s Name
Institution’s Name
Institution’s Location
Date

2
Social media optimisation: Increasing the network size of Facebook
Introduction
The media industry has been on the verge of growth and expansion with every platform
striving to have the highest subscribers. The campaign to win the number of users has been
observed among different stakeholders who utilise the social platforms for marketing,
advertising, client education on the use of the products and services, and basing on the customer
reviews for improvement (Qiao and Zhang, 2017, pp. 105-123). However, for the media
platforms to have as many subscribers as possible, several factors are considered as determinants
for growth that is measured based on the number of users. Therefore, expansion of the social
media networks is a paramount problem the firms and the media companies have been struggling
to solve to win the market shares in the industry through maximisation of the available
opportunities that would harness social media platform usage.
(Zhang and Gupta, 2018, pp.914-925) Depicted that optimisation of the social media
platform is an effective strategy for growing the network, in essence, having more subscribers
that are pertinent to market shares. Concisely, many users, for instance, on Twitter, Facebook, or
integral reflects heavy usage of the platform which in turn generates a lot of revenue to the
companies. Although optimisation has been proposed as one of the methods for solving the
challenges of growing social, media networks. Some scholars have disputed while narrowing
down the fact that the type of the optimisation technique is the cornerstone for addressing the
effectiveness in social media network growth. Therefore, the report would focus on the problem

3
of identification of optimal strategy that can be deployed to increase the network size of
Facebook (Ballings, Van den Poel, and Bogaert, 2016, pp.15-25).
Social media optimisation
(Rossmann, and Young, 2016, pp.1-52.) Defined social media optimisation as an
essential catalyst for growing a company’s online presence that entails strategic creation,
building, and maximising the social media plan for connecting to the target audience. The author
acknowledged that the growth of the social presence underlines the practices such as
strengthening the brand and generating of leads which results in getting more visible online thus
connecting to the audience.
Overview of the problem
Facebook has been experiencing an increment of the users’ way above the estimated
increase among the subscribers with approximately 1.35 billion active users monthly while 864
million active daily users (Ballings, Van den Poel, and Bogaert, 2016, pp.15-25.). This has
resulted in limitations of the Network size due to the millions of pieces of information that are
posted on the daily basis that cause the traffic overload on the network which could likely slow
down the speed of access to information. For effective retrieval and sharing of information, the
network infrastructure requires to be sufficient to enable a series of activities that to be
performed with the speeds needed by the end-users such as streaming, posting information,
downloading, and sending of all type of files to other users. A limitation of the network size
prevents the performance of the mentioned activities, which could inconvenience the users such
as the advertising and marketing companies prompting them to seek other platforms (Hamad and

4
Al-Shboul, 2017, pp. 107-117). With the emergence of the new technologies that have facilitated
fast internet speeds, the problem of small size network can barely be explained to the
subscribers, who by chance have no idea of the technical operations that are performed before
the social platform is availed. Therefore, the company has to keep up with the optimisation
techniques to increase the network size for accommodating the ever-growing number of
subscribers to retain its users as well as increasing the market shares in the media industry
(Sanni, Leemoon, Arora, and Edmonds, 2018, pp. 17-33). The summary is shown below.
Table 1: Summary of the Optimization Problem
Input Variables
User parameters for example
 Recency
 Demographic/gender
 Educational/ professional
 Geographical location etc.
Decision Variables User account type i.e. business account, user account etc.
Objective
To increase the Network size of Facebook which will
enable accommodation active millions of subscribers
accessing the platform o daily basis at high speeds.
Constraints
 Number of active users
 Relationship/ links between users
 Number of parameters
 Number of hours
Collection of data
Before conducting the mathematical computations using various models, data was
collected for the Facebook users using web crawling mechanisms where the variables such as
recency update variables (last update), demographic variables, in essence, gender, educational/
professional variables, and the geographical location variables were collected for evaluation