#worldhealthday 2014: The Anatomy of a Global Public Health Twitter Campaign

Public health campaigns seek to positively affect health-related behaviors and/or raise awareness of various health-related issues. These campaigns have traditionally utilized such means as mass media broadcasting and distribution of physical or Web-based materials. In recent times, social media systems such as the micro blogging platform Twitter have also been increasingly utilized for public health campaign delivery. This is a relatively recent phenomenon and as such is not yet extensively studied or well understood. In this paper we examine a case study of a significant global Twitter-based public health campaign, namely that involving the use of the world health day hash tag during and surrounding the 2014 World Health Day on April 7th 2014, involving a data set of over 160 million tweet deliveries. The characteristics of this public health campaign within the Twitter medium are explored via utilizing software tools that enable the capture and summarization of large-scale sets of micro-blog postings.