JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Hospitals use Facebook for education, communication, relationship building and business promotion. Hospitals use their dedicated Facebook pages to achieve communication objectives with promotional, emotional and informational orientation. Despite increasing use of Facebook among hospitals, there are limited research evidences available regarding Facebook post characteristics, content-theme and audience engagement with respect to Indian private hospitals’ Facebook pages.

Objective:

This study explored relationship between Facebook post characteristics and engagement outcomes for selected private multispecialty hospitals in India.

Methods:

Content analysis was conducted using posts published during 2024 on official Facebook pages of 10 selected private multispecialty hospitals. Final analysis included 3,137 posts. Post characteristics included in this study were post format, call-to-action (CTA) presence, content orientation and weekday or weekend posting. Content orientation was coded as informational, relational and promotional post content. Total engagement was calculated by combining likes, comments and shares. Engagement was standardized per 10,000 page followers and it was transformed using natural logarithm. Main effects general linear model examined adjusted associations while controlling for stable differences across hospital pages. Type III tests, partial eta-squared, estimated marginal means, Bonferroni-adjusted comparisons, HC3 heteroscedasticity-consistent inference and residual-based sensitivity analysis were used.

Results:

Model was significant at F(14, 3122) = 152.58, p < .001. It explained 40.6% of the variance in log engagement. Hospital identity showed the largest association (partial η² = .386). Content orientation was the strongest post-level factor at F(2, 3122) = 53.51, p < .001, partial η² = .033. Promotional posts had the highest adjusted engagement. It was followed by relational and informational posts and all pairwise comparisons were found significant. Video posts showed somewhat higher adjusted engagement than non-video posts whereas CTA presence was not significant. Weekday posting activity was significant in primary model but not in the residual-based sensitivity analysis.

Conclusions:

Engagement outcomes were associated strongly with hospital specific context and content orientation rather than with simple structural or timing characteristics of Facebook posts. Findings are limited to selected hospital Facebook pages and indicate associations rather than causal effects. Engagement metrics should be interpreted in relation to hospital context, content purpose and audience size. Lower engagement with informational posts should not be interpreted as evidence of lower value of educational or public health.