Our social media platform, which includes Twitter, enables us to celebrate the success of our grantees, inform partners and stakeholders about our activities, share updates, and stimulate conversation with broader audiences on matters of public interest related to health and aging. Through our communications work, we also encourage our grantees to leverage the power of social media. We believe that it’s an excellent way to raise the profile of the work that we do to improve the health of older Americans. For the uninitiated, though, this begs some basic questions: how, when, why, and WHAT do you tweet? Thankfully, there is now some research to help us answer those questions.

This month’s Harvard Business Review reports on a new study of what people do and do not value in tweets, and why. As described in the article, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Georgia Tech created a website and asked 1,443 users to rate the quality of more than 43,000 tweets. Users rated each tweet as “Worth Reading,” “OK,” or “Not Worth Reading.” They then had the option to explain why they chose that rating by ticking check boxes and responding by free text. The box options were: positive, i.e., a) funny, b) exciting, c) useful, d) informative; or negative, i.e., e) arrogant, f) boring, g) depressing, h) mean. The researchers gathered a subset of 4,220 ratings from high frequency users and applied a statistical confidence test to rank the tweets in eight categories. The findings might underscore why people are apprehensive about jumping into Twitter use: only 36% of tweets were “worth reading,” 25% were not, and 39% were just OK.

As summarized in the article, the best types of tweets fell into these four categories:

  • tweets that expressed a random thought containing humor or an element of novelty;
  • self-promoting tweets that provide links to one’s work;
  • tweets that posed questions to followers in an attempt to crowdsource; and
  • tweets that provided context and new information in a concise way to followers.

Of these tweets “worth reading,” 48% were rated informative, and 24% were rated funny. There was little overlap between the two. Thus, to entice followers to read on, aim to wrap humor around the message or provide a new or interesting perspective on something readers may not know much about. (Note to self: Tweets blending humor or offering new/interesting perspectives are most effective. [That was fewer than 100 characters!])

The worst types of tweets were pointless complaints that left an impression of whining, uninvited tweets that told followers what the user was doing at the moment, tweets that made followers feel as if they were listening in on a private conversation, and useless tweets such as “Good morning, world!” Of the tweets not worth reading, users found 82% boring. They either repeated old news or presented banal comments. (Note to self: Like haikus, tweets require advance planning and thought: What do I see that people need to know? Why? [Ha! Still a mere 119 characters with generous spacing!])

To maximize the impact of Twitter messages, the scientists recommend that users share context in order to be understood or judged worthwhile, and they also recommend that users remember they are interacting with other people and so should be “personal, honest, and transparent.” Their advice made me think that it’s best to imagine ourselves at a party, where we try to engage different people on matters that we think are important, and hope that they act on that message or carry it to another person they meet. That seems the best way to be heard over the maddening cacophony of voices. (Note to self: Maybe tweeting isn’t as scary as it seems. [Just 41 characters!])

To get an insider’s perspective, I asked our partner John Beilenson, President of Strategic Communications and Planning, for his views on these findings. Here are John’s comments:

The data reveal helpful guidelines as we try to tweet in real time, during our busy days. Twitter is a very useful messaging discipline, especially for those of us used to or trained in much longer forms. Tweeting a few times a week (or even each day) teaches message distillation, so we are better prepared when we need a headline for a symposium, have opportunities in front of traditional media, or need to capture someone’s attention quickly.

So, get started. Twitter is certainly public, and your Twitter reputation and following develop over time. Yet, individual tweets are often ephemeral. The Twitter-sphere is always moving. You may have tweets that some deem “not worth reading,” but there is always another humorous, relevant tweet just 140 characters away.

For more information on the uses of social media to advance geriatrics, both in terms of clinical practice improvement and health policy change, see these presentations from the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society. Now, get out there and tweet!