Big social data analytics for public health: Facebook engagement and performance

Abstract

In recent years, social media has offered new opportunities for interaction and distribution of public health information within and across organisations. In this paper, we analysed data from Facebook walls of 153 public organisations using unsupervised machine learning techniques to understand the characteristics of user engagement and post performance. Our analysis indicates an increasing trend of user engagement on public health posts during recent years. Based on the clustering results, our analysis shows that Photo and Link type posts are most favourable for high and medium user engagement respectively.