Facebook: Public Pages and Inter-Organizational Networks

This chapter guides you through the collection, analysis and visualization networks of Facebook public pages. Social media researchers and practitioners often seek to evaluate organizational social media activity and suggest strategies for improvement. Facebook networks can also capture intra-organizational dynamics, for organizations that are large enough to have many public pages. An organization can benefit from a coherent and interconnected structure of its related Facebook pages, allowing Facebook users to easily navigate across a variety of brands, for instance, associated with a company. Furthermore, each Facebook page can become a gateway to different groups of audiences (network clusters), to maximize the exposure of a company’s content on Facebook. Identifying clusters of pages, including their levels of interconnectivity (“Group Edges”) can help an organization to find its best balance between reaching out to a common audience and using its affiliated Facebook pages to bridge out to new audiences.