Using Social Media Network Analysis to Identify and Visualize Twitter Influencers for National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day

Background: As Twitter users interact, social media networks form that can be visualized to provide insights into key information sources and influencers. Influencers have been frequently used in health promotion to raise awareness about various public health issues, including HIV/AIDS. An influencer’s wide ranging and strong connections, along with high public recognition, can make them useful partners in promoting disease awareness days. Social media influencers on platforms like Twitter, can effectively reach younger audiences surrounding sexual health prevention information, can serve as key partners in advancing such awareness day outreach efforts.

Methods: NodeXL, a network analysis application, was used to collect, analyze, and visualize data surrounding the Twitter conversation for the 2016 National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NYHAAD). Using an algorithm, the program groups users by “best fit” to create subgroups in order to analyze the network relationships. The network size and in-degree, a measure of number of links to users, were analyzed to identify central providers of information (hubs) within subgroups who may be influencers. The hubs were categorized by type.

Results: In the dataset, 4,732 tweets were collected, consisting of 2,243 individual users. Fifteen subgroups were identified, with the number of users in each cluster ranging from 19 to 290 users (M=128; sd=90.09). Each subgroup contained an information hub with in-degree measures ranging from 19 to 336 (M=99, sd=81.52). Hub categories included: government agencies (N=3); government leaders (N=2); advocacy groups (N=4); celebrities (N=2); campaigns (N=2); bloggers (N=1) and politicians (N=1).

Conclusions:Key information hubs in the NYHAAD conversation included many advocacy groups and government-related users (e.g. AIDS United and CDC.gov). The analysis also revealed individual users, like the young YouTube phenomenon Nicolas Laws and pop singer Miley Cyrus. Such personalities could serve as effective influencers among younger audiences in increasing the reach of disease awareness days like NYHAAD. D.