Hamid Khobzi - Department of Industrial Engineering, Eyvanekey Institute of Higher Education, Eyvanekey, Iran
Babak Teimourpour - Department of Industrial Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

In recent years, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have had a considerable growth. This growth is actually an opportunity for companies to use these social networking sites as a potential marketing tool. They can operate their brand fan pages, interact with their fans and monitor them through these fan pages. In this paper, we investigated the possible impact of users’ comments on popularity of posts from brand fan pages in a social networking site. We collected the required data of different posts in various fan pages and extracted those posts related comments submitted by fans via a data crawler. We followed a sentiment analysis approach to calculate a polarity score for each post. In order to find the capacity of the mentioned impact, we have tested two hypotheses and results shows that eWoM interactions really affect other users’ opinion about a post and motivate them to participate in liking or commenting on that post. The outcomes of this research are useful for every company in terms of managing and monitoring their brand fan pages on social media and how to interact with their fans in these fan pages

social media marketing; eWoM; sentiment analysis; brand; Relationship marketing;