Measuring Audience Engagement for Public Health Twitter Chats: Insights From #LiveFitNOLA

Kristina M. Rabarison · Merriah A. Croston · Naomi King Englar · Connie L. Bish · Shelbi M Flynn · Carolyn Johnson

35 citations0/0 files storedJMIR Public Health and Surveillance

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Social Media in Health Education Public Relations and Crisis Communication Social Media and Politics

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Little empirical evidence exists on the effectiveness of using Twitter as a two-way communication tool for public health practice, such as Twitter chats. OBJECTIVE: We analyzed whether Twitter chats facilitate engagement in two-way communications between public health entities and their audience. We also describe how to measure two-way communications, incoming and outgoing mentions, between users in a protocol using free and publicly available tools (Symplur, OpenRefine, and Gephi). METHODS: We used a mixed-methods approach, social network analysis, and content analysis. The study population comprised individuals and organizations participating or who were mentioned in the first #LiveFitNOLA chat, during a 75-min period on March 5, 2015, from 12:00 PM to 1:15 PM Central Time. We assessed audience engagement in two-way communications with two metrics: engagement ratio and return on engagement (ROE). RESULTS: The #LiveFitNOLA chat had 744 tweets and 66 participants with an average of 11 tweets per participant. The resulting network had 134 network members and 474 engagements. The engagement ratios and ROEs for the #LiveFitNOLA organizers were 1:1, 40% (13/32) (@TulanePRC) and 2:1, -40% (-25/63) (@FitNOLA). Content analysis showed information sharing (63.9%, 314/491) and health information (27.9%, 137/491) as the most salient theme and sub-theme, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest Twitter chats facilitate audience engagement in two-way communications between public health entities and their audience. The #LiveFitNOLA organizers' engagement ratios and ROEs indicated a moderate level of engagement with their audience. The practical significance of the engagement ratio and ROE depends on the audience, context, scope, scale, and goal of a Twitter chat or other organized hashtag-based communications on Twitter.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

References

2012Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media 2014Are Health Behavior Change Interventions That Use Online Social Networks Effective? A Systematic Review 2010Dissemination of health information through social networks: Twitter and antibiotics 2015Tweeting as Health Communication: Health Organizations’ Use of Twitter for Health Promotion and Public Engagement 2014The Use of Social Networking Sites for Public Health Practice and Research: A Systematic Review 2016Interactive social media interventions to promote health equity: an overview of reviews 2012Evaluating Social Media’s Capacity to Develop Engaged Audiences in Health Promotion Settings 2014The social media revolution is changing the conference experience: analytics and trends from eight international meetings

Cited by

2019Criteria to Measure Social Media Value in Health Care Settings: Narrative Literature Review 2022Evaluating the Effectiveness of Internet-Based Communication for Public Health: Systematic Review 2019Twelve tips for developing and implementing a medical education Twitter chat 2024Role of public relations practices in content management: the mediating role of new media platforms

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.