Content area
Objective
To assess the effects of using health social media on different days of the working week on web activity.
Design
Individually randomised controlled parallel group superiority trial.
Setting
Twitter and Weibo.
Participants
194 Cochrane Schizophrenia Group full reviews with an abstract and plain language summary web page. There were no human participants.
Interventions
Three randomly ordered slightly different messages (maximum of 140 characters), each containing a short URL to the freely accessible summary page, were sent on specific times on a single day. Each of these messages sent on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was compared with the one sent on Monday.
Outcome
The primary outcome was visits to the relevant Cochrane summary web page at 1 week. Secondary outcomes were other metrics of web activity at 1 week.
Results
There was no evidence that disseminating microblogs on different days of the working week resulted in any differences in target website activity as measured by Google Analytics (n=194, all page views, adjusted ratios of geometric means 0.86 (95% CI 0.63 to 1.18), 0.88 (95% CI 0.64 to 1.21), 0.88 (95% CI 0.65 to 1.21), 0.91 (95% CI 0.66 to 1.24) for Tuesday–Friday, respectively, overall p=0.89). There were consistent findings for all outcomes. However, activity on the review site substantially increased compared with weeks preceding the intervention.
Conclusion
There are no clear differences in the effect when 1 weekday is compared with another, but our study suggests that using microblogging social media such as Twitter and Weibo do increase information-seeking behaviour on health. Tweet any day but do Tweet.
Details
; Adams, Clive E 2 ; Friedel, Johannes S 3 ; McClenaghan, Eimear 4 ; Montgomery, Alan A 5 ; Välimäki, Maritta 6 ; Schmidt, Lena 3 ; Xia, Jun 7 ; Zhao, Sai 8 1 Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Psychiatry, Melbourne Health, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2 School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
3 Hochschule Furtwangen University of Applied Sciences, Furtwangen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
4 Medical School, University of Aberdeen Institute of Applied Health Sciences, Aberdeen, UK
5 Nottingham Clinical Trials Unit, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
6 Department of Nursing Science, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; Department of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
7 Systematic Review Solutions Limited, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK; Nottingham Health China, The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
8 Systematic Review Solutions Limited, Ningbo, China