ABSTRACT

The WeChat Official Account (WCOA) is the most influential self-media platform in China, and the follower economy brought by the extension of self-media has profoundly affected its survival and development. Therefore, it is of vital importance to understand the followers' behavioural patterns and the law of quantity change of followers. To study this problem, we collected the operation data of two WCOAs. First, an evolutionary Followers-Susceptible-View-Forward-Removed (F-SVFR) model is proposed to describe the trends in the behavioural state of the followers of WCOA after accepting the pushed message. Second, we proposed an equation to simulate the number of newly increased followers and find that the number of newly increased followers of WCOA followed a similar pattern that grew rapidly in the early stages and kept a relatively low and steady rate of increase rate later on. Finally, the popularity formula is defined for the WCOA to serve as a predictor of online popularity, which demonstrated that popularity is positively correlated with the number of followers. Our study provides account operators with practical guidance, which has significance for understanding the popularity of increased official accounts and the law of quantity growth of followers.