Content Analysis of Social Networks in Health Organizations

The dramatic growth of Web 2 technologies and the emergence of social networks offers great potential for the dissemination of health behavior change programs and healthcare. Organizations and providers of health services, as major contributors to these programs, have a large share of these tools. This study aimed to provide a classification for the content that health organizations publish on social networks.

This study was conducted using qualitative content analysis method. To this end, in the first step based on existing literature, the study of the previous frameworks and the results of the researchers work in this field, initial coding was done; and in the next step, by analyzing a sample of 582 posts published on social networks by 11 leading health organizations in the world, categorization and coding were completed.

Data analysis resulted in the extraction of 27 subcategories that consisted of 14 main categories including informational, educational, emotional, event, inviting, experiential, functional, alerting, employee, challenging, introductory, advertising, expressive, and celebrities for health organization content.

The findings of the present study provide a comprehensive framework for the classification of health posts. This classification can be used by health policymakers to generate health-related content with new ideas as well as everyday use to interact with social media audiences.