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Global Business Review
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© 2019 IMI
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DOI: 10.1177/0972150918825078
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1
Information Systems Area, XLRI—Xavier School of Management, Circuit House Area, Jamshedpur, India.
Corresponding author:
Shabana Chandrasekaran, Information Systems Area, XLRI—Xavier School of Management, Circuit House Area, Jamshedpur 831001,
India.
E-mail: shabana.c@astra.xlri.ac.in
Decoding User Interaction
Dynamics on Facebook Fan Page:
A Sentiment Mining Approach
Shabana Chandrasekaran
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Supriya Kumar De
1
Abstract
Increased presence of firms on social media like Facebook has enabled users to interact directly with
the firms. As this platform is used for brand promotions, it is important for firms to understand the
dynamics of user interaction that happens on the brand’s fan page. This study investigates the influence
of marketer-generated content (MGC) and the recursive effect of sentiments on user interaction with
the help of sentiment mining approach and negative binomial regression. The analysis is done over
2,121 marketers’ content and 22 million user content across the top five Facebook brand pages in India.
The results show that an increase in positive comment sentiment triggers increased liking and shar-
ing behaviour by the users on the marketers’ content. Moreover, users are more inclined to like and
share on marketers’ contents that are informative posts. Posts containing images garner higher likes
and comments, but videos have higher shares. The results are useful for the brands to understand user
behaviour on a brand’s social media fan page.
Keywords
Facebook fan page, sentiment mining, social media, user interaction
Introduction
Web 2.0 has enabled users to create and share high-volume content about products and services which
firms now prefer to listen to and mould the business activities for projecting the brand positively.
This active participation of consumers on social media has shifted the power balance to the consumer
side. Consumers’ purchase decisions are now powered by product reviews generated by like-minded
consumers than through advertisements and other forms of personal communication (Dellarocas, 2006).
As social media have become a critical channel for brand-related information, it is of utmost importance