COVID-19 Social media insights: assessing the potential role social media might play on knowledge and preventive behaviour during emergency periods

This analysis focuses on exploring key themes and sentiments on Twitter's public discourse in the context of COVID-19. The main analytical strategy in this piece of research has been a quantitative approach, adopted to provide an understanding of Twitter's public discourse and sentiments concerning COVID-19 during the different phases of the pandemic. The contextualization of the results, on the other hand, adopts a qualitative dimension, where the aim is to embed the quantitative results obtained from the main analysis in a review of the related work. Findings indicate that the study of topics discussed in online communities, as well as the analysis of sentiments and emotion's patterns of texts shared in social platforms; might be an important tool to measure and indicate public sentiments with regards to any specific topic in a near-to-real-time. Secondly, with a further understanding of the causal relationship between sentiment trends and topics, it could be possible to use social media monitoring activities to strategically design future communication campaigns for further promoting and encouraging preventive behaviour; whilst increasing health literacy. Additionally, social media monitoring activities could contribute to measure the social acceptance of new health instruments or measures