Kicking a smoking habit can feel like a lonely endeavor, but researchers in California have found Twitter’s social media platform can help build a community of successful quitters.
When subjects in a smoking cessation program tweeted each other regularly, they had a cessation rate of up to 75%, according to researchers.
The key was a counselor-developed daily “automessage” delivered via a Tweet2Quit group. Open-ended messages, such as, “What will you do when you feel the urge to smoke?” encouraged exchanges between participants. About 23% of tweets were responding to these texts; 77% were spontaneous.
Cornelia Pechmann, professor of marketing at University of California-Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business, and Judith J. Prochaska, associate professor of medicine at Stanford, reported in the Journal of Medical Internet Research that 78% of participants tweeted their fellow study subjects at least once during the 100-day study.
The study’s original test group had a smoking cessation rate of 42%. When researchers tweaked the automessaging process, a second group had a success rate of 75%.
Participants were furnished with free nicotine patches and a web-based guide to develop a cessation plan. They were asked to tweet their group daily.
“The Twitter environment created a sort of party dynamic,” Pechmann said. “That’s especially important for social smokers.”
From the May 01, 2016 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
