Gough A, Barrett RF, Ajao O, et al. (2017). Tweet for behavior change: Using social media for the dissemination of public health messages. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance. 3(1): e14. doi: 10.2196/publichealth.6313
Researchers examined the reach and engagement achieved by a two-phase public health Twitter campaign. During the first phase, researchers tweeted about skin cancer prevention using different frames (informative, story, shock, humor, opportunistic) on the Twitter account of a North Irish cancer charity for 10 weeks. There was a two-week break before phase two, where researchers tweeted on a new Twitter account for eight weeks. In phase two, researchers asked users to simultaneously tweet a common message in support of the campaign (i.e. a “Thunderclap”). Researchers collected data from a survey assessing attitudes and knowledge of skin cancer prevention advertised to North Irish Twitter users before (n=337) and after (n=429) the campaign and analytics made available by Twitter (views, clicks, ratio of clicks to views, likes, shares). Researchers also paid to promote tweets to North Irish users and contacted popular users (i.e. influencers) to engage with the campaign to examine different promotion strategies. The campaign achieved 417,678 views, 11,213 clicks, and 1,211 retweets. Shock tweets had the greatest median number of views (2,369), humorous tweets had the greatest median number clicks (148) and the highest median click rate (14.8%), and informative tweets had the greatest median number of retweets (17). Influencer engagement with Tweets increased views, but paid promotion did not improve engagement by any metric. Finally, the Thunderclap achieved 2,527 views, two clicks, and seven retweets.