Analytical Understanding of Social Media Influence on Maternal Choices and Infant Feeding Preferences

Breastfeeding was the traditional way of infant feeding, but the invention of formula milk gave women the freedom to choose how to feed their children. This study aimed to understand social media's influence on maternal choices and infant feeding analytically. Using Twitter API allowed us to retrieve data, and one month after collection, tweets which included "breastfeeding" or "formula milk" started analysing. Thence, the data was examined based on sentiment by R programming language. Furthermore, the most popular words for each sentiment, the length of the tweets by positive or negative feelings for days of the week, and the positive or negative emotions by country were investigated for both baby feeding techniques. Eighty-one thousand seven hundred thirty-seven tweets were collected. While 58887 (72%) tweets were breastfeeding-related, 22850 (28%) tweets belonged to formula milk. Even though breastfeeding and formula milk are two different approaches, positive sentiment had the highest score for both. Moreover, while people from the West side of the world were actively sharing their thoughts on feeding techniques, people from most of the East did not tweet about formula milk. Twitter is a beneficial social media platform for real-time data across the world and gives people an opportunity to express their feelings. However, users prefer to communicate their positive experiences on infant feeding with longer tweets than their negatives