Aims: Social media, because of its broad coverage, is an attractive option for communicating public health messages. However, the lack of a theoretical framework, supporting the two-way communication of social media, is holding back its development and use. This study investigated the suitability of a dynamic transactional model (DTM) of communication for explaining the use of social media for communicating public health messages.
Methods: The study was carried out on 'Don't know? Don't drink', a Facebook campaign against drinking alcohol during pregnancy that targeted women of childbearing age in New Zealand. The comments generated were analysed for two features of DTM, namely inter- and intra-transaction, by examining the plurality of topics and polarity of sentiments, using text-mining techniques.
Results: The analysis of the textual data revealed nine independent topics, confirming the plurality of topics. The conversation contained both positive and negative terms, establishing the polarity of sentiment.
Conclusions: This study verified the two DTM features (inter- and intra-transaction) in the comments produced by the 'Don't know? Don't drink' campaign implemented on Facebook. DTM exhibited the potential to be a theoretical framework for recommending and evaluating social media sites like Facebook for communicating public health messages.
Keywords: alcohol during pregnancy; dynamic transactional model; public health messages; social media; two-way communication.