A comparison of the popularity of an APOD image posted to Facebook and Instagram, and a study to find the optimal number of postings to Facebook

Once an image is considered for the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), it is sometimes helpful to check its popularity on social media sites. Two “focus group” sites, one on Facebook, named Sky, and the other one on Instagram, called universe_view_screen, are utilized for this purpose. Sometimes an image’s popularity on Facebook Sky is quite different from the one posted on universe_view_screen. A study is performed to check if there is a correlation between the two sites. This study could provide information on the factors responsible for popularity of images in one group over the other. Thereby help to judge preference of an image to be posted to APOD.

Furthermore, with the increasing incoming pictures taken by astrophotographers worldwide, selecting one or two images becomes challenging. Hence posting more than two images every day to Facebook Sky seems to do more justice to their hard work. However, this could negatively affect page likes and lead to a decreased number of page views. Hence a study is done by re-posting past known popular images to Sky at different times of the day and then comparing them to check if there is any change in popularity.