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Facebook “likes” are often used as a proxy of users’ attention and an affirmation of what is posted on Facebook (Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). To determine what factors predict “likes,” the authors analyzed Facebook posts made by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the top three candidates from the 2016 US primary election. Several possible factors were considered, such as the types of posts, the use of pronouns and emotions, the inclusion of slogans and hashtags, references made to opponents, as well as candidate’s mentions on national television. The results of an ordinary least-squared regression analysis showed that the use of highly charged (positive or negative) emotions and personalized posts (first-person singular pronouns) increased “likes” across all three candidates’ Facebook pages, whereas visual posts (posts containing either videos or photos) and the use of past tenses were liked more often by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ followers than by Trump’s followers. Television mentions boosted likes on Clinton and Sanders’ posts but had a negative effect on Trump’s. The study contributes to the growing literature on digitally networked participation (Theocharis, 2015) and supports the emerging notion of the new “hybrid media” system (Chadwick, 2013) for political communication. The study also raises questions as to the relevance of platforms such as Facebook to deliberative democratic processes since Facebook users are not necessarily engaging with the content in an organic way, but instead might be guided to specific content by the Facebook timeline algorithm and targeted ads.

When the spread of online health rumors on social media causes public concerns, the public is calling for action. However, little study has investigated how Facebook reaction icons (expressing feelings function) affect online users' behavioral intentions (intention to trust and share) toward online health rumor posts. The current study addresses this gap by focusing on the effect of Facebook reaction icons in two conditions: Facebook reaction icons' presence (versus absence), and Facebook reaction icons' emotional valence (positive versus negative versus neutral). Moreover, the authors also investigated the interaction between Facebook reaction icons' emotional valence and online health rumor posts' framing headlines (gain versus loss).

The authors used a 7 (Facebook reaction icons: Love, Like, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry and no icon) × 2 (Facebook framing headlines: gain and loss) between-subjects design, analyzing 507 samples from online users with one-way ANOVA and MANOVA.

Results show that online health rumor posts without Facebook reaction icons are more likely to negatively change online users' behavioral intentions than the posts with Facebook reaction icons; negative reaction icons (Sad and Angry) lower online users' behavioral intentions than positive reaction icons (Love and Like). Further, the incongruency effect of interaction (i.e. positive reaction icons with a negative message) would have more negative effects on online users' behavioral intentions than the congruency effect (i.e. positive reaction icons with a positive message).

This study has rich contributions to theoretical and practical implications for the Facebook platform and Facebook users to apply Facebook reaction icons against online health rumor posts.

American police departments are beginning to implement social media as a strategy to engage the surrounding communities through various methods, including Facebook and Twitter. The purpose of this paper is to examine the varieties in the use of Facebook and Twitter by local police departments.

This study collected all data between October 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014 from Facebook and Twitter accounts of seven city police departments in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. These agencies resemble many police departments in the USA, and in total serve a diverse population of approximately 1,435,000. Content analysis and statistical tests are conducted.

Results show that specific types of posts are more engaging for the community. Facebook and Twitter interactions vary depending upon the type of posts, demonstrating that citizens are using Facebook and Twitter to interact in different ways.

The findings presented here give police agencies’ insight on how to appropriately adjust their use of social media to fulfill the needs of the citizens and optimize interactions with the community.

This is the first study to systematically examine and analyze the varieties in the use of social media by traditional American local police departments and their interactions with citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of scholarly discussions of academic publications on the social web and to further discuss the validity of altmetrics as a research impact assessment tool for academic articles.

Facebook posts citing psychological journal papers were collected for both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A content analysis approach was adopted to investigate topic preferences and motivations for scholarly discussions among academic and non-academic Facebook users.

Non-academic users were more actively engaged in scholarly discussions on Facebook than academic users. Among 1,711 Facebook users in the sample, 71.4 percent of them belonged to non-academic users, while 28.6 percent were from an academic background. The Facebook users cited psychological articles with various motivations: discussion and evaluation toward articles (20.4 percent), application to real life practices (16.5 percent), self-promotion (6.4 percent), and data source exchange (6.0 percent). However, nearly half of the posts (50.1 percent) were simply sharing articles without additional user comments. These results implicate that Facebook metric (a count of mentions of a research article on Facebook), as an important source of altmetrics, better reflects the attitudes or perceptions of the general public instead of academia.

This study contributes to the literature by enriching the understanding of Facebook metric as an academic and non-academic impact assessment tool for scientific publication. Through the content analysis of Facebook posts, it also draws insights into the ways in which non-academic audiences are engaging with scholarly outputs.

The study aims to investigate the time for social media posts and reviews in order to determine the best timing to ensure maximum outreach and interactions from users. The study intends to analytically investigate a company's Facebook and Instagram pages to get meaningful insights for effective post management.

“Great Deal Tires” company’s Facebook and Instagram business pages were taken as the case study and patterns and analytical insights for different posts using Facebook and Instagram analytics were identified. The study categorically selected posts from Facebook pages and Instagram pages that were posted at different times and assessed on their impact.

According to the study, Tuesday and Wednesday have higher engagement on the Great Deal Tires Facebook page, while Friday has higher engagement on Instagram. The study also provided valuable insights into post content and timing in order to increase the marketing impact of the posts.

The study provides an analytical framework for analyzing post and review timing on various company business pages, allowing marketers to initiate more user visits and interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the utilization of the social network, Facebook, as an instrument of stakeholder engagement and dialogic accounting in American charitable foundations, specifically non-profit organizations that are dedicated to philanthropy.

The research motivation involves whether online interaction through Facebook could represent a channel of dialogic accounting that engages organizational stakeholders. This paper aims to understand if this dialogue is geared to generate a consensus necessary to deliberate over decisions that are shared between all stakeholders, or if a divergent and agonistic perspective, which highlights struggles and differences between actors, prevails. The present study employs a form of content analysis that takes into account the Facebook pages of the 100 largest American philanthropic foundations.

The primary goal of the analysis is to examine the discrepancies in terms of how (and how much) large organizations are using Facebook. The study wants to provide more details on which kind of information large organizations are willing to disclose and collect on Facebook, and to evaluate the level and type of interaction between foundations and users.

Further research could build on the present study by providing in-depth case studies and extending the analysis to other social media and other types of organizations.

Social media represent a powerful mechanism to engage stakeholders in a polylogic conversation. However, the scholarly literature confirms that further studies are necessary to understand how companies and organization can exploit this potential.

This study is dedicated to universities' strategic social media communication and focuses on the fan engagement triggered by Facebook postings. The study contributes to a growing body of knowledge that addresses the strategic communication of universities that have thus far hardly dealt with questions of resonance and evaluation of their social media messages.

Using the Facebook Graph API, the authors collected posts from the official Facebook fan pages of the universities listed on Shanghai Ranking's Top 50 of 2015. Specifically, the authors retrieved all posts in a three-year range from October 2012 to September 2015. After downloading the Facebook posts, the authors used tools for automated content analysis to investigate the features of the post messages.

Overall, the median number of likes per 10,000 fans was 4.6, while the number of comments (MD = 0.12) and shares (MD = 0.40) were considerably lower. The average Facebook Like Ratio of universities per 10,000 fans was 17.93%, the average Comment Ratio (CR) was 0.56% and the average Share Ratio (SR) was 2.82%. If we compare the average Like Ratios (17.93%) and Share Ratios (2.82%) of the universities with the respective Like Ratios (5.90%) and Share Ratios (0.45%) of global brands per 10,000 fans, we may find that universities are three times (likes) and six times (shares) as successful as are global brands in triggering engagement among their fan bases.

The content analysis was solely based on the publicly observable Facebook communication of the Top 50 Shanghai Ranking universities. Furthermore, the content analysis was limited to universities listed on the Shanghai Ranking's Top 50. Also, the Facebook posts have been sampled between 2012 and September 2015. Moreover, the authors solely focused on one social media channel (i.e., Facebook), which might restrict the generalizability of the study findings. The limitations notwithstanding, university communicators are invited to take advantage of the study's insights to become more successful in generating fan engagement.

First, posts published on the weekend generate significantly more engagement than those published on workdays. Second, the findings suggest that posts published in the evening generate more engagement than those published during other times of day. Third, research-related posts trigger a certain number of shares, but at the same time these posts tend to lower engagement with regard to liking and commenting.

To the authors’ best knowledge, the automated content analysis of 72,044 Facebook posts of universities listed in the Top 50 of the Shanghai Ranking is the first large scale longitudinal investigation of a social media channel of higher education institutions.

Social networking sites and Facebook have grown to become an important channel of interactive marketing communication with consumers for retail. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways posts characteristics and reactions affect post popularity and engagement in retail brands Facebook pages.

In total, 18 retail brand pages out of the 120 most popular brand pages on Facebook in Greece are examined for a three months’ period (April–June 2016). In all, 2,627 posts are analyzed with the use of OLS regressions in order to identify the characteristics of posts that increase consumers’ engagement, including the newly introduced reaction feature.

The results suggest that richness of content (images and videos) and message length increase the engagement levels and the popularity of posts. Reactions have a positive effect on engagement, and negative reactions stronger than positive reactions, except in sharing. On the other hand, posting time does not seem to have a statistically significant impact on the engagement and popularity of a post.

The study was conducted during a period that reactions were only recently introduced by Facebook, therefore users and brands may not have been familiarized with their use.

The study contributes to the understanding of consumer engagement with retail brands’ pages on Facebook and social media, and the ways they use reactions and other ways of interactions with brand posts. The results can provide some insight to retailers on how to achieve higher levels of engagement for their brands through their Facebook pages, improving the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns.

The findings contribute in understanding the ways users interact with brand posts in Facebook using reactions, using a number of popularity measures, providing useful insights about reactions, engagement and e-WoM, extending prior research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of word-of-mouth (WOM) types, WOM valence, content types and discussion topics of user posts on online engagement in two channels of a consumption community. The posts are composed by users on the discussion forum and shared to the Facebook channel of the consumption community by the administrators.

The data for this study were obtained from a popular car consumption community in Vietnam. A total of 505 user posts on the discussion forum were manually coded and assigned to WOM types, valence and content characteristics. The online engagement metrics were measured by the number of views and replies on the discussion forum, and the number of likes, comments and shares on Facebook.

The results indicate that the WOM types and valence have a significant impact on online engagement and the popularity of posts on Facebook is associated with the number of views on a discussion forum. The content type and discussion topic partially influence some factors of the online engagement metrics.

The findings are helpful for consumption community administrators to understand and manage their users’ engagement. Moreover, it indirectly supports brands and companies, since the consumption communities also include sub-communities of particular brands and marketers cooperate with consumption communities for their social media marketing strategies.

This research contributes to the literature of online engagement in two aspects. First, this study examines the impact of WOM types and valence. Second, this is the first study investigating the effects of posts by users within an information flow from a discussion forum to Facebook.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore what kinds of social media content public libraries create to communicate with users online, and to examine the relationships between social media content types and corresponding levels of user engagement.

The sample comprises 4,637 Facebook posts collected from 151 public libraries across the USA. The authors identified ten types of Facebook posts based on the open coding, and calculated the degrees of user engagement for each type of Facebook post, represented by the numbers of likes, shares and comments. Also, The authors examined the effects of the inclusions of images or video clips on user engagement.

The authors observed that the most frequent type of post was related to announcing upcoming events held in libraries. This study also found that posts about community news or emotionally inspiring messages elicited much engagement from users. Posts having an image or images tend to receive more user engagement.

Based on the findings of this study, the authors discussed practical strategies for public libraries to effectively use social media to better facilitate user engagement.

This study is one of a few attempts that examine the relationships between the types of social media content and the degrees of user engagement in public library environments. Also, the authors have proposed a coding scheme useful to analyze social media content in the context of public libraries.