Tweeting links to Cochrane Schizophrenia Group reviews: a randomised controlled trial

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Adams, Clive E., Jayaram, M., Bodart, A.Y.M., Sampson, S., Zhao, S. and Montgomery, Alan A. (2016) Tweeting links to Cochrane Schizophrenia Group reviews: a randomised controlled trial. BMJ Open, 6 (3). e010509/1-e010509/7. ISSN 2044-6055

Full text not available from this repository.

Official URL: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/3/e010509

Abstract

Objective: To assess the effects of using health social media on web activity.

Design: Individually randomised controlled parallel group superiority trial.

Setting: Twitter and Weibo.

Participants: 170 Cochrane Schizophrenia Group full reviews with an abstract and Plain Language Summary web page.

Interventions: Three randomly ordered slightly different 140 character or less messages, each containing a short URL to the freely accessible summary page sent on specific times on one single day. This was compared with no messaging.

Outcome: The primary outcome was web page visits at one week. Secondary outcomes were other metrics of web activity at one week.

Results: 85 reviews were randomised to the intervention and control arms each. Google Analytics allowed 100% follow up within one week of completion. Intervention and control reviews received a total of 1162 and 449 visits respectively (IRR 2.7, 95% CI 2.2 to 3.3). Fewer intervention reviews had single page only visits (16% vs 31%, OR 0.41, 0.19 to 0.88) and users spent more time viewing intervention reviews (geometric mean 76 vs 31 seconds, ratio 2.5, 1.3 to 4.6). Other secondary metrics of web activity all showed strong evidence in favour of the intervention.

Conclusion: Tweeting in this limited area of health care increases ‘product placement’ of evidence with the potential for that to influence care.

Trial Registration number: ISRCTN84658943.

Funding: This trial received no funding.

Strengths and limitations of this study

• This is the first randomised controlled trial that we are aware of evaluating the impact of Tweeting health-related web links on access to the target webpage and/or related webpages.

• This study quantifies the effects of Tweeting evidence and generates many questions for future research.

• We used free-to-use software with limited functionality – more sophisticated software may highlight more effects.

• We Tweeted links to large academic reviews focusing on one small area of health care to a relatively small ‘following’. Different techniques of Tweeting, other areas of health care, and a broad set of followers could result in more impact.