In my last post I looked at how charities are using Facebook to post content and engage with their fans (and hopefully donors). At the end of the post I started to have a look at some text based analysis and sentiment to see how often donations were being mentioned or solicited and how positive, negative or neutral posts were over time.

I thought for the next post in the series it might be worthwhile having a brief look at different keywords that might get used within posts and the importance of those words to the three charities I had chosen to look at. Spoiler Alert: This analysis does give away who the charities are.

The obvious place to start would be to have a look at the frequencies of words for each charity. This is the first touch of basic text analysis, unfortunately as we can see below, it doesn’t yield a great deal of insight for us.

To get a great deal more insight it would be better to look at a Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency ratio. In this case our ‘document’ will be all posts by a specific charity. If we look at the chart below now, we can see some more specific words that relate to their specific areas of support.

The final piece I wanted to look at for this post was how often our top 15 words appear in our Facebook posts. In a similar style to my last post I’ve plotted each Facebook post by day and time-of-day to see when they occured. This time instead of looking at the sentiment, I’ve summed up the number of times one of our top 15 words is used in the post.