World Pneumonia Day 2011–2016: Twitter Contents and Retweets

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-24-2018

Publication Title

International Health

DOI

10.1093/inthealth/ihy087

Abstract

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.

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