Using Tweetchats to Build Community Awareness and Advocacy around Alzheimer’s Disease for Latinos

Abstract

U.S. Latinos are 1.5 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD) than non-Latino Whites. To raise awareness of and action around this rising public health issue, Salud America!, a national Latino health advocacy network, organized three #SaludTues tweetchats on Twitter between 2018 and 2020. For the three Alzheimer’s tweetchats ─Aug. 14, 2018, June 6, 2019, and Oct. 6, 2020─Salud America! partnered with global groups that advocate for AD solutions in Latino and other communities. We analyzed the three tweetchats’ #Saludtues hashtag usage, participant demographics, and other metrics using Symplur analytics software. For the first tweetchat in 2018, there were 579 tweets with a total of 3.89 million impressions; the second tweetchat in 2019 had a bigger impact with 704 tweets with 5.72 million impressions; the third tweetchat had the biggest impact with 932 tweets and 6.62 million impressions. Most tweetchat participants were from states with large Latino populations, and most tweets indicated positive sentiment related to increasing awareness of solutions to AD issues among Latinos. The three Alzheimer’s-focused #SaludTues tweetchats particularly served as unique testing grounds for the fast dissemination and increasingly exposed many people to the issue of AD and the need to advocate for the Latino community.