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.