Are health departments tweeting to the choir?

"Health departments really have 10 essential services that they provide, and one of the essential services is to inform and educate their constituency about health and health risks," said Jenine K. Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School and lead author of "Are Public Health Organizations Tweeting to the Choir? Understanding Local Health Department Twitter Followership."

"Social media, if used strategically, can be a useful tool for public health departments," Harris said.

In the study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, researchers analyzed 4,779 Twitter followers from 59 local health departments. Followers from organizations tended to be health-focused, out-of-state, and from the education, government and nonprofit sectors. Individual followers were likely to be local and not health-focused.

"Their followership isn't huge so far -- 400 or 500 people on average, or other Twitter users on average, will follow a health department," Harris said. "And so our next step was to see who those followers were and determine if health departments were reaching people in their local jurisdictions, or who they reaching in general."

The study found that health departments with a higher percentage of local followers were more likely to have public information officers on staff, serve larger populations, and "tweet" more often.

"Social media has the potential to reach a wide and diverse audience," Harris said. "If local health departments can use these platforms, they may be able to reach people during an emergency such as Hurricane Sandy or during a flu outbreak to give people information about where to go and what to do to stay safe."