Day of the week to tweet: a randomised controlled trial

Jayaram, Mahesh; Adams, Clive E.; Friedel, Johannes S.; Mcclenaghan, Eimear; Montgomery, Alan A.; Välimäki, Maritta; Schmidt, Lena; Xia, Jun; Zhao, Sai

Abstract

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.

Citation

Jayaram, M., Adams, C. E., Friedel, J. S., Mcclenaghan, E., Montgomery, A. A., Välimäki, M., Schmidt, L., Xia, J., & Zhao, S. (2019). Day of the week to tweet: a randomised controlled trial. BMJ Open, 9(4), Article e025380. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-025380

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 12, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Apr 4, 2019
• Publication Date: Apr 4, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 28, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 28, 2019
• Journal: BMJ Open
• Electronic ISSN: 2044-6055
• Publisher: BMJ Publishing Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 4
• Article Number: e025380
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-025380
• Keywords: General Medicine
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1699220
• Publisher URL: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/4/e025380
• Contract Date: Mar 28, 2019