How significant are users’ opinions in social media?

Purpose - – The purpose of this study is to assign polarity score to each post from Facebook fan pages, and then examine whether the Comments submitted by users on a post from fan page have a significant relationship with the popularity of that post. Being aware of how to enhance the popularity of posts will help companies in terms of administrating their fan pages. Design/methodology/approach - – In the context of fan page and post popularity, the authors test significance of the relationship between Comments’ polarity and number of Likes and Comments of a post in different Facebook pages by regression method. The data are collected from different fan page posts in Facebook, and a sentiment analysis approach is proposed to accomplish this research. Findings - – Results show that the relation between users’ Comments and popularity of fan page posts is strongly significant. Outcomes of this research are useful for every company in terms of monitoring and managing their brand fan pages on social networking sites such as Facebook. Originality/value - – Investigation of factors influencing popularity of fan page posts in social media is almost a new area of study that dates back to recent years. The authors use a sentiment analysis approach to evaluate a new concept describing the relationship between users’ Comments and popularity of posts from Facebook fan pages. Moreover, a part of dataset is extracted from Facebook by a crawler which is an advantage to prior studies.