Attributes and Predictors of Opinion Leaders on Twitter: COVID-19 Childhood Vaccination Campaign

Identifying attributes of the COVID-19 childhood vaccine message disseminators is beneficial to health campaign research. This study examines the We Can Do This COVID-19 childhood vaccination health campaign message disseminators on Twitter during 2021-2022. Guided by the diffusion of innovation theory and the theory of the two-step flow communication, we classify the disseminators (n=823) and examine their influence over the two-year period. A manual content analysis and social network analysis were conducted to measure the impact of disseminators on their networks through in-degree centrality assessment. Results revealed that experts in medical fields, industrial professionals, and social media influencers were the top three most common career titles disclosed in Twitter bios among individual accounts, whereas local nonprofit organizations, governments, and companies were the most common organizational accounts. Mann-Whitney U Tests indicated that in both years message disseminators with clinical medicine expertise were more influential than those who did not reveal such expertise. However, only in 2021 were campaign message disseminators with parental expertise more influential within the social network. We discuss the implications of disseminator classification as well as the significance of enhancing health campaigns by identifying who discusses them on social media.