Social Media Listening of COVID-19 Vaccination in Louisiana: How Do People in Louisiana Talk about COVID-19 Vaccination on Social Media after 3 Years from Its Outbreak?

Background:

As of March 2023, about 62% of Louisiana's population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 23% are fully vaccinated. Although the state has seen a decrease in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the COVID-19 vaccination rate is much lower than the U.S. average. In addition, it is worth noting that vaccination rates can vary significantly by region and demographic group within Louisiana. Louisiana continuously faces challenges in distributing COVID-19 vaccines and booster shots.

Program background:

Despite three years of pandemic experience, Louisiana still needs to make efforts to increase vaccination rates and reduce vaccine hesitancy, enhance the protection of vulnerable populations, control community transmission, and prevent the emergence of other possible variants and negative economic impacts caused by the pandemic. Responding to these needs, the present study investigated the public perception of COVID-19 vaccination with an AI-based social media conversation analysis tool, which will provide important suggestions for pandemic health campaign designers and policy decision-makers.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

This study employed a method of social media analysis that is called social media listening (SML). SML is the analysis to identify and assess what people converse on a variety of topics on diverse social media platforms. This study used an AI-based social media conversation analysis software that has been actively used for academic research and designing business strategies. The software analyzes people’s conversations on social media platforms by controlling for the type of social media, keywords, and the range of time. This study used three keywords, “COVID-19 vaccine,” “COVID-19 vaccination,” and “Louisiana.” The range of time was from January 2022 through January 23. This study focused exclusively on Twitter as the social media platform for analysis.

Conclusions:

For this study, 43 thousand conversations on Twitter, selected by combinations of keywords in one year period, were analyzed. Based on its sentiment analysis, 38.25k conversations were neutral about COVID-19 vaccination, 3.83k were negative, while only 450 conversations were positive. Similar to the sentiment analysis, SML identified emotions associated with people’s conversations regarding COVID-19 vaccination. The associated emotions included anger (369 appearances), happiness (122), sadness (115), disgust (14), surprise (5), and fear (1). SML also ran a topic analysis and identified which topics people on Twitter talked about in relation to COVID-19 vaccination. The identified topics included health (10.74k), law and government (7.93k), business & industrial (2.49k), job & education (1.44k), finance (1.36k), and people and society (809).

Implications for research and/or practice:

Social Media Listening revealed that there is still work to be done to improve vaccination rates in the state. Efforts to mitigate expressed anger on COVID-19 vaccination, increase health literacy education about vaccines, and build trust in public health authorities could all help to improve vaccination rates in Louisiana and narrow the gap between Louisiana and the rest of the United States. For this goal, it is important to approach discussions and debates around COVID-19 vaccination with empathy and understanding, recognizing the various sentiments and reasons involved and working towards finding common ground and solutions that prioritize public health and safety over politicizing the pandemic and vaccination.