Synergy Between Public and Private Health Care Organizations During COVID-19 on Twitter: Sentiment and Engagement Analysis Using Forecasting Models

BACKGROUND: Social media platforms (SMPs) are frequently used by various pharmaceutical companies, public health agencies, and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) for communicating health concerns, new advancements, and potential outbreaks. Although the benefits of using them as a tool have been extensively discussed, the online activity of various health care organizations on SMPs during COVID-19 in terms of engagement and sentiment forecasting has not been thoroughly investigated. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this research is to analyze the nature of information shared on Twitter, understand the public engagement generated on it, and forecast the sentiment score for various organizations. METHODS: Data were collected from the Twitter handles of 5 pharmaceutical companies, 10 US and Canadian public health agencies, and the World Health Organization (WHO) from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2021. A total of 181,469 tweets were divided into 2 phases for the analysis, before COVID-19 and during COVID-19, based on the confirmation of the first COVID-19 community transmission case in North America on February 26, 2020. We conducted content analysis to generate health-related topics using natural language processing (NLP)-based topic-modeling techniques, analyzed public engagement on Twitter, and performed sentiment forecasting using 16 univariate moving-average and machine learning (ML) models to understand the correlation between public opinion and tweet contents. RESULTS: We utilized the topics modeled from the tweets authored by the health care organizations chosen for our analysis using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF): c(umass)=–3.6530 and –3.7944 before and during COVID-19, respectively. The topics were chronic diseases, health research, community health care, medical trials, COVID-19, vaccination, nutrition and well-being, and mental health. In terms of user impact, WHO (user impact=4171.24) had the highest impact overall, followed by public health agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; user impact=2895.87), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH; user impact=891.06). Among pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer’s user impact was the highest at 97.79. Furthermore, for sentiment forecasting, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous factors (SARIMAX) models performed best on the majority of the subsets of data (divided as per the health care organization and period), with the mean absolute error (MAE) between 0.027 and 0.084, the mean square error (MSE) between 0.001 and 0.011, and the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between 0.031 and 0.105. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that people engage more on topics such as COVID-19 than medical trials and customer experience. In addition, there are notable differences in the user engagement levels across organizations. Global organizations, such as WHO, show wide variations in engagement levels over time. The sentiment forecasting method discussed presents a way for organizations to structure their future content to ensure maximum user engagement.