Dialogic communication and audience engagement in Hispanic health marketing on X: A computational analysis

This study investigated the overarching themes and dialogic features of the three national-level Hispanic health organizations (i.e., NHMA, NAHH, NHHF). The focus is on how these health organizations utilize social media for Hispanic health and how the themes and dialogic features are associated with public engagement on social media. To achieve this, the study employed structural topic modeling on 18,430 X posts from 2018 to 2023 and negative binomial regression to predict user amplification engagement (e.g., liking, sharing). The study identified four broad thematic areas: health equity and advocacy, health education and disease prevention, professional and organizational development, and research and community engagement. Negative binomial regression analyses showed that amplification engagement was associated with both communicative features and thematic contexts. Hyperlinks were negatively associated with likes and shares, while multiple interaction effects indicated that the associations between dialogic features and engagement varied across thematic contexts. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of X-based communication features depends on message topic rather than operating uniformly across health communication contexts. The study contributes to health marketing research by demonstrating how computational methods can identify the thematic and affordance-based conditions under which organizational health messages are more likely to generate public amplification in digital environments.