#Frailty: A snapshot Twitter report on frailty knowledge translation

Abstract

Objectives: The objectives of this short report are to: (i) explore #Frailty Twitter activity over a six-month period; and (ii) provide a snapshot Twitter content analysis of #Frailty usage. Methods: A mixed-method study was conducted to explore Twitter data related to frailty. The primary search term was #Frailty. Objective 1: data were collected using Symplur analytics, including variables for total number of tweets, unique tweeters (users) and total number of impressions. Objective 2: a retrospectively conducted snapshot content analysis of 1500 #Frailty tweets was performed using TweetReach ™ . Results: Over a six-month period (1 January 2017–31 June 2017), there was a total of 6545 #Frailty tweets, generating 14.8 million impressions across 3986 participants. Of the 1500 tweets (814 retweets; 202 replies; 484 original tweets), 56% were relevant to clinical frailty. The main contributors (‘who’) were as follows: the public (29%), researchers (25%), doctors (21%), organisations (18%) and other allied health professionals (7%). Tweet main message intention (‘what’) was public health/advocacy (41%), social communication (28%), research-based evidence/professional education (24%), professional opinion/case studies (15%) and general news/events (7%). Conclusions: Twitter is increasingly being used to communicate about frailty. It is important that thought leaders contribute to the conversation. There is potential to leverage Twitter to promote and disseminate frailty-related knowledge and research.