Healthy Tweets: Use and Importance of Twitter for Health Prevention

Social media platforms have changed the way people stayinformed, communicate with others, and share ideas. These interactive social platforms are used for many purposes from being in contact with family and friends to promote products and services. However, little is known about the use and importance of social media for health prevention, especially for communication among Hispanic communities.The purpose of this paper is to analyze how social media platforms, especially Twitter, are used for health prevention and communication in Hispanic communities. In doing so, a quantitative content analysis was performed on 3000 tweets with the hashtag #prevención (prevention). Results indicate that most of the prevention messages shared among organizations and users on Twitter were informational messages and very few users promoted interactive communication and mobilization. Mass media and governmental institutions posted more messages to encourage health prevention, especially about publichealth and healthy cities. This study stresses the many social media platforms’ potentialities and functionalities, especially Twitter, that contribute to health prevention and communication. Findings are useful for organizations and users when planning prevention content or campaigns through these platforms.