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.
Keywords: health communication; health marketing; machine learning; manual coding; social media.
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.