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PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF A PUBLIC HEALTH TWITTER CAMPAIGN: WORLD HEALTH DAY 2014
Corresponding Author(s) : Dan Dumbrell
Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews,
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2014)
Abstract
Public health campaigns aim to positively affect health-related behaviors and/or raise awareness of specific health conditions, risk factors and issues. These campaigns have traditionally relied upon various media and mechanisms for success, such as mass media distribution by television and radio, information propagation by individuals, involvement and engagement of stakeholders, and recruitment to the campaign of celebrities or advocates well known to the community.
More recently, microblog platforms such as Twitter have also been increasingly utilized for public health campaign delivery. This is a relatively recent phenomenon and so is not yet well understood or studied. In this paper we provide an initial description of a case study of a global Twitter-based public health campaign, namely that involving the use of the #worldhealthday hashtag during and surrounding the 2014 World Health Day, April 7th 2014.
In addition, the various characteristics and properties of this public health campaign within this contemporary medium are explored utilizing software tools that enable the capture and analysis of Twitter information flows.
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- Livingston, J. D., Tugwell, A., Korf-Uzan, K., Cianfrone, M. and Coniglio, C., Evaluation of a campaign to improve awareness and attitudes of young people towards mental health issues, Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 2013, 48(6), pp. 965-973.
- Stekler, J. D., Baldwin, H. D., Louella, M. W., Katz, D. A. and Golden, M. R., ru2hot?: A public health education campaign for men who have sex with men to increase awareness of symptoms of acute HIV infection, Sexually transmitted infections, 2013, 89(5), pp. 409-414.
- Terry-McElrath, Y. M., Emery, S., Wakefield, M. A., O'malley, P. M., Szczypka, G. and Johnston, L. D., Effects of tobacco-related media campaigns on smoking among 20–30-year-old adults: longitudinal data from the USA, Tobacco control, 2013, 22(1), pp. 38-45.
- Leavy, J. E., Rosenberg, M., Barnes, R., Bauman, A. and Bull, F. C., Would you find thirty online? Website use in a Western Australian physical activity campaign [online], Health Promotion Journal of Australia: Official Journal of Australian Association of Health Promotion Professionals, 2013, 24(2), pp. 118-125.
- Loss, J., Lindacher, V. and Curbach, J., Online social networking sites—a novel setting for health promotion?, Health & place, 2014, 26, pp. 161-170.
- Chatfield, A. T., Scholl, H. J. and Brajawidagda, U, # Sandy Tweets: Citizens' Co-Production of Time-Critical Information during an Unfolding Catastrophe, In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014, pp. 1947-1957.
- Dumbrell, D. and Steele, R., Twitter and Health in the Australian Context: What Types of Information Are Health-Related Organizations Tweeting?, In Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2013, pp. 2666-2675.
- Dumbrell, D. and Steele, R., What are the characteristics of highly disseminated public health-related tweets?, In Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, 2012, pp. 115-118.
- Dumbrell, D. and Steele, R., The Changing Nature of Health Information Dissemination through the Role of Social Media, Applied Mechanics and Materials, 2013, 411, pp. 110-114.
- Steele, R. and Dumbrell, D., Putting the public into public health information dissemination: social media and health-related web pages, In Proceedings of the 17th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, 2012, pp. 135-138.
- Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F. and Gummandi, K.P., Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy, ICWSM, 2010, 10, pp. 10-17. 2010.
References
Livingston, J. D., Tugwell, A., Korf-Uzan, K., Cianfrone, M. and Coniglio, C., Evaluation of a campaign to improve awareness and attitudes of young people towards mental health issues, Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 2013, 48(6), pp. 965-973.
Stekler, J. D., Baldwin, H. D., Louella, M. W., Katz, D. A. and Golden, M. R., ru2hot?: A public health education campaign for men who have sex with men to increase awareness of symptoms of acute HIV infection, Sexually transmitted infections, 2013, 89(5), pp. 409-414.
Terry-McElrath, Y. M., Emery, S., Wakefield, M. A., O'malley, P. M., Szczypka, G. and Johnston, L. D., Effects of tobacco-related media campaigns on smoking among 20–30-year-old adults: longitudinal data from the USA, Tobacco control, 2013, 22(1), pp. 38-45.
Leavy, J. E., Rosenberg, M., Barnes, R., Bauman, A. and Bull, F. C., Would you find thirty online? Website use in a Western Australian physical activity campaign [online], Health Promotion Journal of Australia: Official Journal of Australian Association of Health Promotion Professionals, 2013, 24(2), pp. 118-125.
Loss, J., Lindacher, V. and Curbach, J., Online social networking sites—a novel setting for health promotion?, Health & place, 2014, 26, pp. 161-170.
Chatfield, A. T., Scholl, H. J. and Brajawidagda, U, # Sandy Tweets: Citizens' Co-Production of Time-Critical Information during an Unfolding Catastrophe, In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014, pp. 1947-1957.
Dumbrell, D. and Steele, R., Twitter and Health in the Australian Context: What Types of Information Are Health-Related Organizations Tweeting?, In Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2013, pp. 2666-2675.
Dumbrell, D. and Steele, R., What are the characteristics of highly disseminated public health-related tweets?, In Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, 2012, pp. 115-118.
Dumbrell, D. and Steele, R., The Changing Nature of Health Information Dissemination through the Role of Social Media, Applied Mechanics and Materials, 2013, 411, pp. 110-114.
Steele, R. and Dumbrell, D., Putting the public into public health information dissemination: social media and health-related web pages, In Proceedings of the 17th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, 2012, pp. 135-138.
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F. and Gummandi, K.P., Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy, ICWSM, 2010, 10, pp. 10-17. 2010.