JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

While social media is commonly used in public health campaigns, there is a gap in our understanding of what happens after the campaign is seen by the target audience. Frequently reported social media metrics, such as reach and engagement, do not reflect whether the audience accepts the campaign, or more importantly, whether they take up the campaign’s message. This study investigates whether analysing social media comments can provide insight into how a campaign is received, by examining Facebook comments about the Shisha No Thanks campaign. Shisha No Thanks aims to raise awareness of the harms of shisha (also known as waterpipe) smoking among young people from Arabic-speaking background in Sydney, Australia. A campaign video was produced and shared widely on social media, where it received over 10,000 Facebook comments.

Objective:

This study aims to understand how the Shisha No Thanks video was received by the target audience by analysing Facebook comments posted to it. Specifically, this study aims to determine whether the audience accepted or rejected the campaign’s message.

Methods:

A sample of the Facebook comments was extracted using Facebook’s Graph API (application programming interface). The study team developed content categories consistent with the research question. The categories were: ‘Accept’ the campaign message, ‘Reject’, and ‘Unclear’. Subcategories were developed based on common themes in each category. The categories were reviewed by Cultural Support Workers (health workers who support multicultural communities) to ensure the cultural meanings of the comments were captured. Each comment was then coded by three team members, and only assigned a category if there was agreement by at least two members.

Results:

The Shisha No Thanks video reached 435,811 people and received over 11,000 comments. Of the n=4,990 comments that were sampled, 9.1% (n=456) accepted the campaign message, 22.9% (n=1,144) rejected the message, 21.8% (n=1,089) were unclear, and 46.1% (n=2,301) contained only tagged names. Of our sample, 2.8% (n=138) indicated the commenter took on board the campaign message by expressing an intention to stop smoking shisha, or asking a friend to stop smoking shisha. Of the comments that showed rejection of the campaign, the majority were people dismissing the campaign by laughing at it or expressing pro-shisha sentiments.

Conclusions:

This study demonstrates that conducting content analyses of social media comments can provide important insight into how a campaign message is received by the target audience. Analysing Facebook comments on the Shisha No Thanks video showed that almost one in 10 people who commented accepted the campaign message, and almost 3% took up the campaign message. On the other hand, analysing the Facebook comments also provides important insight into perspectives of people who did not accept the campaign message, which can be useful in developing future interventions on this issue.