Using text analytics to measure an effect of topics and sentiments on social-media engagement: Focusing on Facebook fan page of Toyota

Abstract

In this study we investigate whether Facebook fan-page posting types and topics have a significant effect on engagement. More specifically, the media type and content theme of posting on Facebook are examined to see whether or not there was a difference between content topics. In order to achieve this goal, we set hypotheses as follows: (1) the media types of posting have a significant effect on engagement; (2) the topics and sentiment polarity of posting have a significant effect on engagement. We tested these hypotheses using research procedures as follows: (1) collection and preprocessing of social-media data, including posting types, comments, and reactions on Facebook fan pages, (2) topic modeling of fan-page postings using R and SAS, (3) testing hypotheses using a negative binomial regression model, and (4) implications and insights for social-media marketing. Topic modeling applying to textual data and sentiment analysis were conducted. After that, in order to find the factors to affect the number of Facebook fan-page engagements, the negative binomial regression model including post type, topic, sentiment, reactions of “love,” “haha,” and their interaction as exploratory variables was considered. Finally, the results show that post type is the most influential factor to affect social-media engagement, and content topics, sentiments of posts and comments also have significant effects on it.