Comparative analysis of trending tweets in Twitter during the year 2022 on days of public health significance

INTRODUCTION

Social media has become an integral part of modern life.¹ Social media has interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.^2,3 The most notable aspect of this is it influences society as a whole and holds a significant place in people's minds. These include social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook®, as well as microblogging platforms like Twitter®, Snapchat®, and Instagram®.⁴ In the past twelve years, social network platforms have virtually tripled the number of users they have—from 970 million in 2010 to 4.76 billion in January 2023 equating to 59.4% of the total global population. People use 36.2% of Twitter® for entertaining content, 37.9%, for following research brands and products, 61.2% for news and updates on current events, 22.4% for messaging friends and family, and 30.7% for a post or sharing photos or videos.⁵ Initially, it was used to connect public figures such as celebrities, and higher officials with the general public, but new applications have emerged and social media has been widely used for health-related purposes, such as health interventions, health campaigns, medical education, and disease outbreak surveillance. Other uses of social media include the ability to offer opinions and reviews on anything we see, direct contact with target audiences, and increases popularity with ease.

An interactive social media network called Twitter® was created in 2006. Advertisers could reach 556.0 million Twitter® users in January 2023, ranking it 14th among the world's most active social media platforms. In Twitter®, males account for approximately 63% of the population, while females account for 37%. Twitter® is used by 8.9% of all people aged 13 and above worldwide.^6,7 The total number of users that marketers can reach with advertisements on Twitter® increased by roughly 12 million (2.1%) in the three months leading up to January 2023. Currently, Twitter® is the most popular form of social media used for healthcare communication.⁸ Twitter® priorities shorter, more frequent posts. Because of the real-time nature of the material and the simplicity of accessing and reviewing publicly available information, Twitter® offers public health researchers a distinctive big data source.

A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash symbol#. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services as a form of user-generated tagging and collection of tweets about same condition that enables cross-referencing of content by topic or theme^.9 Hashtags are a great way for employees and students in professional fields and education. Hashtags are used as a tool in social media to share content and gain maximum popularity. Nowadays, the health care sector is using hashtags to spread their agenda during health-related campaigns.¹⁰

Hence the aim of this analysis was to compare the number of tweets received by public health campaigns compared to trending tweet and likes in twitter on those specific days.

METHODS

This study was carried out between January to February 2023 to determine the extent to which the public reacts to health events. As this study does not involve subject materials, ethical clearance was not obtained. However, consent was obtained from relevant authorities to use the software program to analyze the number of tweets for the purpose of this study. In this study, public health related hashtags were compared to the general hashtags that received the maximum tweets on those specific days. Recent posts with hashtags of nine general health and five dental public health related campaigns, totally about fourteen were selected from Twitter based on public health importance (Table 1). The hashtags were examined by two investigators (DC and RS) using the awario tool (https://awario.com) and they were cross checked by the third and fourth author (MK and AS). Awario®, a social media monitoring tool owned by Search engine optimization (SEO) software, searched the internet in real-time for mentions of the chosen keywords. We ensured that our intended use was compliant with Awario® policy by applying and obtaining their consent to use their platform for educational purpose. The search was conducted globally, including tweets from all languages, and the search time was customized between 01 January 2022 to 31 December 2022. We ensured the collection of the records in such a way that the records for health-related campaign lies from 15 days before and after that particular campaign and the trending campaign record was taken on dates in respect to the days of public health significance. We excluded tweets that fell outside of our specified time frame. We made advantage of the tool's regular search, dashboard, and mention features. The data was retrieved using downloadable PDF files, which contained the number of likes received.

The top trending hashtags with the most likes were analyzed using the website https://www.wincalendar.com. We looked for top trending campaigns that had the most global reach. We manually entered the data collected from both Awario and Windows calendar into an excel spreadsheet. Descriptive statistical analysis was performed.

RESULTS

Table 2 represents the comparison of likes received to general health campaigns when compared to the trending campaigns. Among the nine general health campaigns, no likes were received for five campaigns and three campaigns got likes which were greater than the trending campaigns. #World blood donor day was one of the three general health campaigns which received 3400000 likes which was greater than the trending campaigns on the same day. Table 3 compared the likes garnered for dental public health related campaigns versus trending campaigns on those days. Among the oral health related tweets, only #National tooth brushing day campaign garnered 76000 likes compared to 218500 likes by the post of Daniel Radcliffe on that day. None of the other oral health related tweet garnered likes.

DISCUSSION

This comparative analysis expressed the number of likes on health-related campaigns on Twitter between January 2022 to December 2022.This study looked at a large number of tweets on health campaigns that offered an alternative perspective to any of the earlier social media studies.

A study done by George et al showed that photos outperform links, videos, and text-based updates in terms of engagement. Social media has a lot of promise for reaching different demographics, but people are less reluctant to share or like postings on health-related events, which makes the posts less popular.¹⁰ Twitter has more information from organizational sources than other media; this makes people tend to search and share more information from agencies, professional groups, and health professionals in Twitter. Twitter provides a list of verified accounts and the profiles of these accounts are marked with a blue badge which might contribute to the authenticity of the users.¹⁰ We analyzed nine general health campaigns and five dental public health campaigns from January 2022 to December 2022. In order to determine whether a tweet received the most likes on these particular days of public health significance, we compared the likes with those of trending hashtags on the particular day. Reach of Public health campaign was 30% of the trending campaigns. Out of the fourteen public health related campaigns, five campaigns garnered likes which were image based. In line with the study conducted by George et al our study also demonstrated that most public health related campaigns were image based.¹⁰ Since the twitter users prefer liking or sharing image based information, it is advisable that public health campaign should include image based methods for dissemination of information. Among the campaigns included in this study, #World blood donor day, #World breast cancer day, #World aids day campaigns garnered more likes than the trending campaigns which substantiates the importance of image based messages. National tooth brushing day campaign was the only trending campaign for oral health awareness as it was promoted by a health related organization which ensured its members propagate the information. Hence future twitter based health campaigns should focus on image based information which is endorsed by a reputed organization and also its members should be involved in reaching out their contact list for dissemination of information. Additional endorsement of this message by popular twitter users could also increase the reach of the information and hence ensures the success of the campaigns.

A similar study on the patterns and characteristics of posts related to specific health issues (#dengue, #dengue virus, #zika, and #zika virus, ebola) on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram found that Facebook posts were more popular and had more posts from verified accounts. ^11,12 They also demonstrated that research-related posts were more prevalent on Twitter. Thackeray et al examined tweets on breast cancer awareness during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 2012 and demonstrated that the majority of tweets did not promote any specific prevention behaviour.¹³

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrated that out of the fourteen health-related campaigns only three general health campaigns got more likes than the other health campaigns. This research provides a novel perspective on the viability of how to use Twitter handling the dissemination of health-related information to the general public.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors would like to thank the Awario® team and Windows Calendar website for providing free access to their tool in analyzing the twitter® data.

Funding: No funding sources

Conflict of interest: None declared

Ethical approval: Not required

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