Thursday, April 1, 2010

Some Tweets Are Better Left UnTweeted

Researchers at Columbia University have analyzed thousands of tweets, 52,000 to be exact, to find out what healthcare consumers are hearing about health-related issues. They searched for the word 'antibiotic,' then searched for 'cold,' 'flu' and 'share' within those tweets.

As stated in the NPR article, researches found that 170,000 users were told to use antibiotics for the flu and 850,000 were recommended them for their colds. For healthcare providers, this is cause for much frustration, as the cold and and flu are cause by viruses that are immune to antibiotics.

Be careful with who you follow and what advice is just Twittered to you. It could just be some Twit who's whale should fail. Te cuidado.

2 comments:

H Dolezal said...

this is really interesting, I guess it goes to show not to believe everything you read on twitter!

susanvictoria87 said...

It’s creative of them to use Twitter to collect information on health care. The relationship between social media and business and they way they affect each other is a pretty interesting.