So, you are only looking at the individual role that people are posting from, right? Wouldn't you also want to look at some of the content? If yes to the second question, then you could base your research upon that which others have conducted. For instance, I conducted a study of a social media campaign, looking to the content of text, images, and who posted.

Dear Amy Turner Yes, you can do an analysis and Is is viable to conduct a The recommendation to use qualitative software to keep track of your coding makes sense. as well as You could use it as a platform to distribute your survey or you could download some special software to provide details about traffic and other factors related to your designated page. you can see this link :

http://umpir.ump.edu.my/id/eprint/17141/1/A%20survey%20of%20text%20mining%20in%20social%20media%20facebook%20and%20twitter%20perspectives.pdf

That sounds interesting! Yes, you can certainly use content analysis for social media posts.

Here’s an example of a paper that uses content analysis for online discussion (which is not the same, but is similar): https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/A:1003764722829.pdf

Good luck on your research!W

A. S. CohenMiller Perhaps I wasn't clear, sorry. I am intending on conducting a content analysis on user comments on Instagram posts to identify the occurrence of negative experiences of the anti-obesity campaign, as described by the individuals themselves. I was looking to find published research which used instagram comments for analysis as I haven't been able to find any as yet!

Certainly, you can do content analysis of social media posts. If I were to review such a paper, I would look for how you address the question of samples and generalizability. You are apparently analyzing the responses to one post, or to a series of related/similar posts. How many total posts are there? Enough to provide data saturation? Are you analyzing every post? A random sample of all posts? Are you quantifying the posts to perform some kind of statistical analysis? If so, you need to be careful about the extent to which you generalize your findings outside of the scope of these social media posts.

Michael W. Marek thank you for your points, I will give them consideration when writing up my analysis. I will be analysing comments of all 12 related posts, the most popular has over 500 comments so I believe I will achieve data saturation.

Amy Turner With that number of posts and comments, you can do content analysis as you would from any other data source. It sounds like a good opportunity for a quantitative/qualitative methodology. Quantitative to describe the categories of posts and qualitative for richness of understanding. One benefit of this kind of study is that it does not include human subjects, because you are analyzing posts that people have self-published (although you may still need to file for an exemption). Also, you don't need to wait for surveys to be returned, etc.

A simplified approach appears in the article below. It does have some limitations but may provide a helpful framework.

Ward, J. (2016). A content analysis of celebrity Instagram posts and parasocial interaction. Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 7(1).

A more elaborate coding technique but it has some great categorizations suggestions. As suggested above, think of substituting themes for photographs.

Hu, Y., Manikonda, L., & Kambhampati, S. (2014, May). What we instagram: A first analysis of instagram photo content and user types. In Eighth International AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.

Third example, but also includes a call for qualitative studies (p.1186)to bolster quantitative content analyses on Instagram.

Ging, D., & Garvey, S. (2018). ‘Written in these scars are the stories I can’t explain’: A content analysis of pro-ana and thinspiration image sharing on Instagram. New Media & Society, 20(3), 1181-1200.

Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jtUdqNqH5o