RESEARCH ARTICLE Significance of likes: Analysing passive interactions on Facebook during campaigning Mohammad Adib Khairuddin1,2☯*, Asha Rao1☯ 1 Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences, School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2 Jabatan Sains Komputer, FSTP, Universiti Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. *
[email protected] Abstract With more and more political candidates using social media for campaigning, researchers a1111111111 a1111111111 are looking at measuring the effectiveness of this medium. Most research, however, con- a1111111111 centrates on the bare count of likes (or twitter mentions) in an attempt to correlate social a1111111111 media presence and winning. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Interaction a1111111111 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) cam- paign data, we label an FP as performing well if both the posting frequency and the likes OPEN ACCESS gathered are above average. Our method shows that over 60% of the MGE13 candidates Citation: Khairuddin MA, Rao A (2017) and 85% of the AFE13 candidates studied in this paper had under-performing FP. Some of Significance of likes: Analysing passive interactions these FP owners would have been identified as popular based on bare count. Thus our per- on Facebook during campaigning. PLoS ONE 12 formance chart is a vital step forward in measuring the effectiveness of online campaigning. (6): e0179435. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0179435 Editor: Gaoxi Xiao, Nanyang Technological University, SINGAPORE Received: November 16, 2016 Accepted: May 29, 2017 Introduction Published: June 16, 2017 Many researchers have used the number of likes and twitter mentions as a means of determin- Copyright: © 2017 Khairuddin, Rao.