JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Ageism has long manifested itself as one of the most pervasive yet least acknowledged forms of prejudice. However, the issue has slowly been gaining some long overdue recognition in public discourse. Over the last decade, many organizations aimed at serving the needs and interests of older adults have turned to social media platforms such as Twitter to improve the visibility of age-related issues. However, notwithstanding their growing presence and participation online, minimal attention has been paid to the use of social media among age advocacy groups. To achieve policy change, age advocacy organizations must first be able to mobilize audiences.

Objective:

Our study elucidates features of tweets that are associated with time to peak engagement.

Methods:

We collated 204,905 tweets spanning 12 years and from 53 organizations. Engagement score of each tweet was calculated through established metrics (e.g., summing up of likes, retweets, etc). We ran Cox models with tweet features as predictors, and ‘time-to-peak-engagement’ as the outcome. ‘Peak engagement’ (event) refers to engagement scores above the 75th percentile, and ‘time’—months/tweet to reach peak engagement.

Results:

As hypothesized, tweet features associated with peak engagement are inclusion of three/more hashtags (p < .001), visual elements—e.g., photos increased a tweet’s ability to reach peak engagement by over 4 times (p < .001); quote tweets increased engagement by 3 times (p < .001), compared to regular tweets, controlling for account-level covariates. Conversely, tweets from organizations with higher tweet volume were 40% less likely to reach peak engagement (p < .001), suggesting the value of selective tweeting.

Conclusions:

Social media is an important catalyst for policy action. In enabling timely dissemination of ideas among users, social media has the potential to reach users on a global scale and at an exponential speed. Having delineated the strategies for peak engagement on Twitter, our study provides an invaluable resource for age advocacy organizations in their important movement to combat ageism.