Thanks for the advice, may I follow up on this? My first thought was poisson, too. But poisson distributions (and gaussian) assume the events occur independently, as far as I know. And that should not be true for follower counts because, I guess, there is some kind of (nonlinear) preferential attachment process behind this (e.g. http://networksciencebook.com/chapter/3#not-poisson). Might be I missed something. Maybe someone knows studies that fit distributions of social media metrics? Am 06.05.2020 um 21:53 schrieb Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice):
considering the number of followers is a count variable (non-negative discrete numbers), is is either a poisson, negative-binomial, or sero-inflated distribution log-transforming the distribution for further (statistical) analysis is not advised.
best Maurice