Grey Forecasting Models for Social Media Adoptions of Transnational Enterprises

The lack of adoption data posed difficulties for social media researchers and resulted in scant social media studies focusing on forecasting models. To broach the subject, this study put efforts in studying the benchmark transnational enterprises and collecting the first-hand adoption time data through the APIs of three dominating social media platforms: Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. Grey system theory facilitates prediction problems of insufficient information, small samples, and uncertainty. Therefore, we compared the performance of two grey forecasting models, GM (1, 1) and grey Verhulst model, to gain insight into social media adoption trends. Our preliminary results indicated that GM (1, 1) performs better as a potential forecasting model to keep track of trends in adoptions of social media platforms in the market. Keywords-grey system theory; grey forecasting; GM (1,1);