A snapshot on the use of #wellness as health promotion over a random 24-hour period on Twitter

Introduction: Wellness is an emerging, multibillion-dollar industry. Many professional services claim to adopt wellness into their business model, including chiropractic. Social networking sites like Twitter have been utilized to promote a variety of services. We report on the usage of the #wellness hashtag as a method of wellness and health promotion. Method: This study was approved for IRB exemption (#2012-010) by Life Chiropractic College West, Hayward, CA. A snap-shot search was made on Twitter for #wellness during a randomly selected 24-hour period. We categorized the source of the #wellness tweets into different professional services and calculated the frequencies using IBM SPSS (v19; Chicago, IL). Results: A total of 415 #wellness tweets occurred in 24-hours. Sources of wellness tweets were Advertising (27%), General population/Bloggers/News (21.9%), Other (foreign language; 18.6%), Multi-level marketing (14.5%), and Exercise/Fitness specialists (6.7%). Healthcare providers were the lease frequent source (Chiropractors (1.2%), Medical Doctors (0.7%), Nutritionists (3.1%) and Acupuncturists (0.7%)). Discussion: The source of #wellness tweets for health professionals seem to be lower than sales tweets. Chiropractors seem to under utilize Twitter to promote wellness and health promotion. Conclusion: Further study is required to determine the relationship between the characteristics of healthcare providers and social networking usage to promote wellness care.