No abstract

Engaging social media key opinion leaders to facilitate health education about vaccination in their tweets may allow reaching a wider audience online.

Pinterest and Instagram are similar platforms for Zika virus prevention communication. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2017;11:656-659).

Background: Twitter is used for World Pneumonia Day (WPD; November 12) communication. We evaluate if themes of #pneumonia tweets were associated with retweet frequency.Methods: A total of 28 181 original #pneumonia tweets were retrieved (21 November 2016), from which six subcorpora, 1 mo before and 1 mo after WPD 2011-2016, were extracted (n=6721). Underlying topics were identified via latent Dirichlet allocation and were manually coded into themes. The association of themes with retweet count was assessed via multivariable hurdle regression.Results: Compared with personal experience tweets, tweets that both raised awareness and promoted intervention were 2.62 times as likely to be retweeted (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.62 [95% 1.79 to 3.85]) and if retweeted had 37% more retweets (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] 1.37 [95% CI 1.06 to 1.78]). Tweets that raised concerns about vaccine price were twice as likely to be retweeted (aOR 2.29 [95% CI 1.36 to 3.84]) and if retweeted, had double the retweet count (aPR 2.05 [95% CI 1.27 to 3.29]) of tweets sharing personal experience. Conclusions:The #pneumonia tweets that both raised awareness and promoted interventions and those discussing vaccine price were more likely to engage users than tweets about personal experience. These results help health professionals craft WPD messages that will engage the audience.

BackgroundThe Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), manages a Twitter profile (@CDC_AMD). To our knowledge, no prior study has analyzed a CDC Twitter handle’s entire contents and all followers.ObjectiveThis study aimed to describe the contents and followers of the Twitter profile @CDC_AMD and to assess if attaching photos or videos to tweets posted by @CDC_AMD would increase retweet frequency.MethodsData of @CDC_AMD were retrieved on November 21, 2016. All followers (N=809) were manually categorized. All tweets (N=768) were manually coded for contents and whether photos or videos were attached. Retweet count for each tweet was recorded. Negative binomial regression models were applied to both the original and the retweet corpora.ResultsAmong the 809 followers, 26.0% (210/809) were individual health professionals, 11.6% (94/809) nongovernmental organizations, 3.3% (27/809) government agencies’ accounts, 3.3% (27/809) accounts of media organizations and journalists, and 0.9% (7/809) academic journals, with 54.9% (444/809) categorized as miscellaneous. A total of 46.9% (360/768) of @CDC_AMD’s tweets referred to the Office’s website and their current research; 17.6% (135/768) referred to their scientists’ publications. Moreover, 80% (69/86) of tweets retweeted by @CDC_AMD fell into the miscellaneous category. In addition, 43.4% (333/768) of the tweets contained photos or videos, whereas the remaining 56.6% (435/768) did not. Attaching photos or videos to original @CDC_AMD tweets increases the number of retweets by 37% (probability ratio=1.37, 95% CI 1.13-1.67, P=.002). Content topics did not explain or modify this association.ConclusionsThis study confirms CDC health communicators’ experience that original tweets created by @CDC_AMD Twitter profile sharing images or videos (or their links) received more retweets. The current policy of attaching images to tweets should be encouraged.