CDC, Ebola & Tweet Chats: was this venue a success?

In our previous post we discussed how Ebola had been emerging as a topic of discussion on social media, and how the conversation was actually dwindling as the number of lives being claimed by the virus grew.  That trend has certainly changed given a series of events resulting in cases popping up in a number of other countries.  The graph below provides an update that clearly shows the now surging conversation on several Ebola related hashtags. What’s more, aside from hashtag usage, the keyword “Ebola” has gone from being used in about 100,000 tweets per day to pretty consistently over 1,000,000.  And on the day after it was announced that there was a case in Dallas, Texas, there were over 2,000,000 tweets containing the word “Ebola”. We also showed how authoritative entities such as The World Health Organization (@WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, @CDCgov) have played an important role.  Not only are they needing to use social media to disseminate accurate information related to the disease, but they are also needing to police the social web looking out for rumors, hoaxes, and other forms of wrong, potentially harmful information. Liz Neporent (@Lizzyfit) of ABC News recently authored an article describing the rumor in Nigeria about drinking salt water to prevent Ebola. A practice that directly resulted in two deaths.  And just yesterday I came across this tweet (below) while researching this post. Virus researchers say Ebola c...
Source: Fox ePractice - Category: Health Managers Authors: Tags: Connecting the dots in healthcare social media Newsletter analytics CDC Ebola government WHO Source Type: blogs