JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The rising volume of health-related social media activity, where users connect, collaborate, and engage, has increased the significance of analyzing how people use them.

Objective:

The aim of this study is to classify the intent–e.g., share experiences, seek support–of users who participate in health-related social media, and study the effect of the user demographics to the posting intent.

Methods:

We analyzed two different types of health-related social media: (1) health Web forums WebMD and DailyStrength, and (2) general Web-based social networks Twitter and Google+. We identified several post intents and built classifiers to automatically detect the intent of posts. These classifiers were used to study the distribution of intents for various demographic groups.

Results:

The results of this study are: (1) we achieved accuracy of at least 84% and balanced accuracy of at least 81.25% for half the intents in our experiments; (2) the majority (70.04%) of posts by male WebMD users ask for advice; (3) male users’ WebMD posts are more likely to ask for medical advice than female users’ posts; (4) the majority (> 80%) of posts on DailyStrength share experiences, regardless of the gender, age group, or location of their authors; (5) health-related posts on Twitter are used to share experiences less frequently than posts on WebMD and DailyStrength; and (6) health-related educational material is shared on Google+ most frequently by Asian users and least frequently by users with age 35-44.

Conclusions:

We studied and analyzed the intent of users participating in health-related social media. Our results can guide health care providers and practitioners to create effective and targeted health care campaigns.