Social media analytics and reachability evaluation - #Diabetes.

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Digital Health Communication
• Social Media Analytics

Background:

• Diabetes is a lifestyle disorder manageable through public awareness.
• Social media platforms like Twitter are crucial for health communication.
• Understanding Twitter content is key to effective diabetes awareness campaigns in India.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the content, sentiment, and reachability of diabetes-related tweets originating from India.
• To inform public health strategies for diabetes communication on Twitter.

Main Methods:

• Collected 1840 diabetes-related tweets from India via Twitter API (April 2019).
• Manually coded tweet sources, themes, and subthemes from a random sample.
• Conducted lexicon-based sentiment analysis and assessed reachability via retweets and favorites.

Main Results:

• 57.28% of tweets originated from organizations, 42.72% from individuals.
• Informative tweets constituted 50.76%, followed by promotional tweets (21.52%).
• Positive sentiment (40.4%) was most common, followed by neutral (31.14%). The 'diabetes story' theme had the highest reachability.

Conclusions:

• Findings provide insights for public health professionals to optimize diabetes information dissemination on Twitter.
• Effective communication strategies can ensure accurate health information reaches a broader audience.
• Leveraging platforms like Twitter is vital for managing diabetes as a public health issue.