Advocating for Older Adults in the Age of Social Media: Strategies to Achieve Peak Engagement on Twitter.

Background: Over the last decade, many organizations dedicated to serving the needs and interests of older adults have turned to social media platforms, such as Twitter, subsequently rebranded X, to improve the visibility of age-related issues. However, notwithstanding their growing digital presence and participation, minimal attention has been paid to the use of social media among these advocacy groups. To achieve policy change, advocacy organizations must first be able to engage and mobilize audiences.

Objective: Our study aims to elucidate how different tweet features affect the time it takes for posts uploaded by age advocacy organizations to reach peak engagement.

Methods: We collated 204,905 tweets from 53 age advocacy organizations posted over a 12-year period. The engagement score of each tweet was calculated by combining well-established metrics, namely likes, retweets, quote tweets, and replies. We ran Cox models with tweet features as predictors and time-to-peak engagement as the outcome. "Peak engagement" (event) refers to engagement scores above the 75th percentile, and "time" refers to months taken to reach peak engagement per tweet.

Results: Approximately 1 in 2 tweets (n=103,068, 50.3%) had either no hashtags or just 1 hashtag. Around two-thirds (n=131,220, 64%) of the tweets included a URL. Visual information was highly underused, with most tweets not including GIFs (n=204,202, 99.7%), videos (n=199,800, 97.5%), or photos (n=143,844, 70.2%). Roughly half (n=101,470, 49.5%) of the tweets contained mentions and 9.3% (n=19,009) of tweets were replies. Only 4.5% (n=9285) of tweets were quote tweets. Most tweets were uploaded in the afternoon (n=86,004, 42%) and on a weekday (n=180,499, 88.1%). As hypothesized, features associated with peak engagement were the inclusion of visual elements like photos, which increased peak engagement by 3 times (P<.001), and the use of 3 or more hashtags (P<.001). Quote tweets increased engagement by 3 times (P<.001), as compared to regular tweets, controlling for account-level covariates. Tweets from organizations with a higher tweet volume were 40% less likely to reach peak engagement (P<.001).

Conclusions: Social media as a networked platform has the potential to reach users on a global scale and at an exponential speed. Having uncovered the features that are more likely to reach peak engagement on Twitter, our study serves as an invaluable resource for age advocacy organizations in their movement to create a more age-inclusive world.