Blood Donation Narratives on Social Media: A Topic Modeling Study

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Computational Social Science
• Communication Studies

Background:

• Social media significantly influences behavior and is crucial for public health initiatives.
• Nonprofits, including blood collection agencies, utilize social media for outreach.
• Blood donor research has largely overlooked the impact of social media.

Purpose of the Study:

• To map the social media landscape concerning blood donation.
• To analyze public discourse on blood donation across social media platforms.
• To understand the evolution of blood donation topics over time.

Main Methods:

• Applied an inductive computational method to analyze unstructured text data from social media.
• Utilized structural topic modeling on seven years of Dutch blood donation data from Facebook and Twitter.
• Identified 25 distinct topics clustered into 6 groups.

Main Results:

• A decrease in messages announcing blood donations was observed over time.
• Topics highlighting the positive aspects of blood donation and donor identity are increasing.
• Significant platform-specific differences emerged: Twitter focused on campaigns/policy, Facebook on donation process/positives.

Conclusions:

• Blood collection agencies must understand the dynamic social media environment for effective recruitment and retention.
• Monitoring public opinion on social media is vital for strategic decision-making.
• Tailoring social media strategies to platform-specific discourse can enhance campaign effectiveness.