Abstract

Online social networks have become an everyday aspect of many people’s lives. Users spend more and more time on these platforms and, through their interactions on social media platforms, they create active and passive digital footprints. These data have a strong potential in many research areas; indeed, understanding people’s communication on social media is essential for understanding their attitudes, experiences, behaviors and values. Researchers have found that the use of social networking sites impacts eating behavior; thus, analyzing social network data is important for understanding the meaning behind expressions used in the context of healthy food. This study performed a communication analysis of data from the social network Twitter, which included 666,178 messages posted by 168,134 individual users. These data comprised all tweets that used the #healthyfood hashtag between 2019 and 2020 on Twitter. The results revealed that users most commonly associate healthy food with a healthy lifestyle, diet, and fitness. Foods associated with this hashtag were vegan, homemade, and organic. Given that people change their behavior according to other people’s behavior on social networks, these data could be used to identify current and future associations with current and future perceptions of healthy food characteristics.

Highlights

  • Food is a part and necessity of every person’s daily life [1]

  • The study by Karami et al (2018) [88] focused on analyzing the characteristics of the general public’s opinions regarding understanding public health opinions on social media as expressed on Twitter, which showed a notable correlation between diet and obesity was determined

  • Influencer marketing is built on building trust between the influencer and the follower, to whom the influencer passes on their knowledge, experience, attitudes, opinions, and values via social media [4,7,75,76]

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Summary

Introduction

Food is a part and necessity of every person’s daily life [1]. from a health and policy point of view, it is necessary to investigate what people eat and their opinions about individual foods. Unhealthy eating is a problem in many countries [2,3], and if national governments need to develop action programs to promote healthy eating, a thorough understanding of consumer attitudes, experiences, and behaviors regarding healthy foods is needed. Users spend more time on these platforms, and create active and passive digital footprints through their interactions with other platform users [5]. These data have a strong research potential in many areas, especially considering that understanding people’s communication on social media is essential for understanding their attitudes, experiences, behaviors, and values [6,7].

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