Twitter Me This: Strategies for Monitoring Twitter to Inform Health Communications Planning

Background: Twitter is a popular online micro-blogging website where users can share information in real-time through updates, or “tweets” of 140-characters or less, and can follow other users. Twitter currently reports over 150 million registered users who are sending out over 55 million tweets on a daily basis. The real-time nature of Twitter offers public health practitioners a glimpse into audience sentiments on any given topic at any given time. In fact, Twitter is such a rich source of historical data, the full Twitter archive was recently acquired by the Library of Congress. This presentation will discuss methods for monitoring Twitter and offer insights on how to apply monitoring results to communications planning efforts.

Program background: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been active in Twitter for Twitter for nearly two years. In addition to using Twitter as a tool for disseminating health information, one of CDC’s goals for participation in Twitter is to monitor public and professional opinion about health topics, emergency events, and related major news stories.  During the 2009 H1N1 influenza response CDC monitored Twitter in order to identify misinformation, gaps in knowledge and stigmatization related to the outbreak.

Evaluation Methods and Results: During the 2009 H1N1 influenza response, CDC’s social media team regularly monitored Twitter keyword trends (Trending Topics), tweets per minute, and summarized major tweet themes in both English and Spanish using the Twitter search engine (search.twitter.com). In the initial phases of the outbreak response in spring 2009, the term “swine flu” was in Twitter’s top Trending Topics on a daily basis, recording thousands of tweets on the topic per minute. As public interest in the outbreak waned over the summer, so too did discussion on Twitter. However, the topic resurged in the Twitter discussion again in the fall when vaccine was becoming available. In 2009, “Swine Flu” was the second most popular “Trending Topic” on Twitter for the year, trailing only the Iran Election as the most talked about news event of the year.  CDC communications staff used trends and messages from Twitter monitoring to develop an environmental and audience analysis, which was then used to guide planning and inform message development during the response.

Conclusions: Twitter provides a wealth of data that can help guide message development. Monitoring Twitter is proving to be a useful tool for identifying and correcting user-propagated misinformation, demonstrating trends in social media mentions around events or time periods, and planning communication and marketing strategies.

Implications for research and/or practice: Monitoring Twitter to conduct audience research and environmental analysis allows health communicators and marketers to better shape message development and communication strategies. With nearly 55 million tweets published daily, Twitter is proving to not only be a valuable channel for message dissemination, but also a tremendous resource for data collection.