Who Tweets About Diabetic Foot on Twitter and Which Tweets Are More Attractive?

Abstract

Diabetic foot is a serious problem for health care systems. Twitter can provide communication between people and it might be an informative tool for health care management. The purpose of this study is detecting the people or organizations that tweet about diabetic foot and analyze the interactions of these tweets on Twitter. All tweets containing the keyword “diabetic foot” in April 2019 were collected. The users were separated into 7 groups: patients with diabetes, health care providers, nongovernmental organizations, information sites and communication media, private companies, medical students, and others. Health care professionals and nonprofessionals were evaluated in likes, mentions, and retweets. The major group was health care providers. By 2-group comparisons of professionals and nonprofessionals, all likes, mentions, and retweets were significantly different (P = .02, P = .04, P < .001, respectively). We concluded that the tweets of health care professionals get more interaction than others. Twitter might be a useful tool to distinguish accurate information about diabetic foot. Also, health care professionals should use for making people aware of the diabetic foot and shed light on society.