Exploring the use of twitter by leading medical centers in the United States

Abstract

Healthcare organizations such as hospitals and clinics increasingly use social media platforms such as Twitter to raise awareness in the community about health and wellness issues. In line with this trend, the current study seeks to understand how Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Mayo Clinic use their primary Twitter accounts to post information related to each of the following major health topics: brain, cancer, diabetes, diet, exercise, heart, mental health, and obesity. Nearly 6,000 tweets posted by those medical centers were collected and analyzed. The results showed that the three medical centers used diet and cancer topics more frequently than the other six topics in their tweets. Moreover, diabetes was consistently the least frequently used topic in the analyzed tweets. The results associated with the other five topics were mixed.