Understanding Twitter Influence in the Health Domain: A social-psychological contribution

Twitter can be a powerful tool for the dissemination and discussion of public health information but how can we best describe its influence? In this paper we draw on social-psychological concepts such as social norms, social representations, emotions and rhetoric to explain how influence works both in terms of the spread of information and also its personal impact. Using tweets drawn from a range of health issues, we show that social psychological theory can be used in the qualitative analysis of Twitter data to further our understanding of how health behaviours can be affected by social media discourse.