MODELING AND FORECASTING THE NUMBER OF MONTHLY ACTIVE WORLDWIDE USERS OF THE SOCIAL NETWORK FACEBOOK

Abstract

Since the first social network was launched, until now, social networks attract a lot of attention from the scientific and professional public, as well as users. The popularity of a particular social network changes over time and it can grow to several million active users, but it can also drop sharply and lead to the shutdown of the social network. Considering that social networks have become one of the key channels of integrated marketing communications of companies, it is vital to estimate the number of active users of a social network in order to make a decision on whether to start, continue or stop advertising on it. This scientific paper aims to do just that, to forecast of the number of monthly active users of the Facebook social network in the period from the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2022 to the second quarter (Q2) of 2024, by modeling time series using the ARIMA methodology. The results of our estimated time series model show that the number of active users of this social network will grow and reach 3.3 billion users by the middle of 2024.