Measuring Health Information Dissemination and Identifying Target Interest Communities on Twitter: Methods Development and Case Study of the @SafetyMD Network

BACKGROUND Little is known about the ability of individual stakeholder groups to achieve health information dissemination goals through Twitter. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to develop and apply methods for the systematic evaluation and optimization of health information dissemination by stakeholders through Twitter. METHODS Tweet content from 1790 followers of @SafetyMD (July-November 2012) was examined. User emphasis, a new indicator of Twitter information dissemination, was defined and applied to retweets across two levels of retweeters originating from @SafetyMD. User interest clusters were identified based on principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) of a random sample of 170 followers. RESULTS User emphasis of keywords remained across levels but decreased by 9.5 percentage points. PCA and HCA identified 12 statistically unique clusters of followers within the @SafetyMD Twitter network. CONCLUSIONS This study is one of the first to develop methods for use by stakeholders to evaluate and optimize their use of Twitter to disseminate health information. Our new methods provide preliminary evidence that individual stakeholders can evaluate the effectiveness of health information dissemination and create content-specific clusters for more specific targeted messaging.