This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Public health groups could reduce childhood obesity with Twitter tactics
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
A recent study showed that physicians, health organizations and makers of public policy could use Twitter to prevent and treat childhood obesity.
While Twitter is known to be popular among lower-income individuals, few public health organizations are active in social media; this represents a lost opportunity to improve communication and share medical advice, according to the study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Jenine K. Harris, PhD, of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues constructed a study to track the use of the hashtag #childhoodobesity on Twitter.
“I think public health so far doesn’t have a great game plan for using social media; we’re still laying the foundation for that,” Harris said in a press release. “We’re still learning what works.”
“Childhood obesity is of great concern to the public health community… People are really talking about it on Twitter, and we saw an opportunity to better understand perceptions of the problem,” she said.
The study divided users of the hashtag #childhoodobesity into demographic groups to determine a perspective of who is active on social media and which groups could benefit most from engagement on the platform.
In the month of June 2014, the program NodeXL was used to track 1,110 tweets from 576 unique Twitter users. The researchers found that more individual users (65.6%) tweeted the term than did organizations (32.9%). In general, most tweets “focused on individual behavior,” rather than commenting on the general environment or on health policy, the study said. Government and education groups were involved in the conversation, but in far fewer numbers than individual users; however, these groups tended to have the most followers.
“There is an opportunity to better disseminate evidence-based information to a broad audience through Twitter by increasing the presence of credible sources in the #childhoodobesity conversation and focusing the content of tweets on scientific evidence,” the researchers wrote.
Follow @EndocrineToday on Twitter for related updates.
Disclosures: Endocrine Today could not confirm disclosures at the time of publication.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts