Personality of Public Health Organizations’ Instagram Accounts and According Differences in Photos at Content and Pixel Levels

Abstract

Organizations maintain social media accounts and upload posts to show their activities and communicate with the public, as individual users do. Thus, organizations’ social media accounts can be examined from the same perspective of that of individual users’ accounts, with personality being one of the perspectives. In line with previous studies that analyzed the personality of non-human objects such as products, stores, brands, and websites, this study analyzed the personality of Instagram accounts of public health organizations. It also extracted features at content and pixel levels from the photos uploaded on the organizations’ accounts and examined how they were related to the personality traits of the accounts. The results suggested that the personality of public health organizations can be summarized as being high in openness and agreeableness but lower in extraversion and neuroticism. Openness and agreeableness were the personality traits associated the most with the content-level features, while extraversion and neuroticism were the ones associated the most with the pixel-level features. In addition, for each of the two traits associated the most with either the content- or pixel- level features, their associations tended to be in opposite directions with one another. The personality traits, except for neuroticism, were predicted from the photo features with an acceptable level of accuracy.

Personality of nonprofit organizations’ Instagram accounts and its relationship with their photos’ characteristics at content and pixel levels

“…These results are distinct from the pattern in the personality of NPOs' Instagram accounts reported in this study. However, a similar pattern can be found in the personality of public health organizations' Instagram accounts (Kim and Lee, 2021): this suggest that Instagram accounts of public health organizations and NPOs share the similar personality in common. This result may be explained by the characteristics of those organizations: public health organizations and NPOs usually aim to contribute to the…”

“…However, the findings suggest that these two traits were visually manifested in an opposite manner. Previous studies have reported that openness and agreeableness were associated in opposite directions with SNS photo features (Liu, 2016;Segalin et al, 2017;Matz et al, 2019;Kim and Lee, 2021), but that was not the case with SNS text features (Pentina and Zhang, 2017;Miller, 2020). Thus, it can be possibly presumed that the difference between the two traits is amplified to be opposite to each other when visually represented in SNS photos.…”

“…Photo features that have been used in the literature ( Ferwerda et al, 2016 ; Ferwerda and Tkalcic, 2018 ; Kim and Kim, 2020 ; Kim and Lee, 2021 ) to analyze Instagram photos were used for analysis. The features were extracted at the content and pixel levels: the content-level features were content category and facial features, and the pixel-level features were pixel color features and visual features.…”