Impact of Online Health Awareness Campaign: Case of National Eating Disorders Association

TL;DR

This study models how online health awareness campaigns, specifically NEDAwareness, influence user behavior and language, revealing key engagement patterns and linguistic shifts post-intervention.

Contribution

It introduces a behavioral modeling approach to measure online campaign impact and highlights the roles of different account types and linguistic changes.

Findings

Governmental and nonprofit accounts receive most retweets.

Post-campaign language shows increased mentions of women, family, and anxiety.

Decreased references to affiliation, others, and positive emotion.

Abstract

National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it publishes content on social media and news aimed to raise awareness of eating disorders. Measuring the impact of these actions is vital for maximizing the effectiveness of such interventions. This paper is an effort to model the change in behavior of users who engage with NEDAwareness content. We find that, despite popular influencers being involved in the campaign, it is governmental and nonprofit accounts that attract the most retweets. Furthermore, examining the tweeting language of users engaged with this content, we find linguistic categories concerning women, family, and anxiety to be mentioned more within the 15 days after the intervention, and categories concerning affiliation, references to others, and positive emotion mentioned less. We conclude with actionable implications for future campaigns and discussion of the method's limitations.