Audience Engagement Factors in Online Health Communities: Topics, Domains and “Scale Effect”

Health communication on social media involves wide audiences through affordances for obtaining specific information such as personal experiences, alternative medical discourses, getting support and sharing knowledge. Yet many of them fail in terms of audience engagement, while others flourish. In the current research, the text-related factors affecting engagement rates were analyzed. The dataset was a sample of 89034 posts from 100 online communities on social networking site vk.com. It was shown that certain topics and domains of posts and communities were associated with higher engagement rates. In particular, “Health in the context of family and parenthood”, “Tips and advice on treatment including traditional medicine”, and “HIV/AIDS and reproductive health” received the highest median engagement rates. The same was true with “social domain” communities devoted to people and organizations compared to less involving “health domain” and “disease domain”. The connection between population of communities and engagement rate varied from weak negative for the entire sample to strong negative for subsample of “health domain”. On the level of individual communities, the ones related to longevity and charitable foundations appeared the most engaging.