In today’s media landscape, audiences increasingly turn to online communities for media consumption and to exchange information about specific niche interests such as health-related topics. This calls for a segmented approach in which interventions are targeted at online communities, tailored to their specific cultures and health-related perceptions, and leverage the dynamics of conversation and social influence in online networks. Strategies drawn from the field of influencer marketing provide interesting opportunities to reach and engage with audiences in a personally relevant manner, including with those who may disagree with an intervention’s message.This article reflects on what health communicators might learn from influencer strategies and proposes digital methods to target and tailor health communication in the digital era. More concretely, we present methods to: (a) identify online communities engaging on a specific health issue; (b) map community specific cultures and health-related perceptions; and (c) identify influencers as potential collaboration partners. As such, we adopt a slightly different take on tailoring by putting the creative and cultural competences of social influencers central, and by aligning our methods with a media mapping protocol to create influencer strategies that are tailored to the cultures and health-related perceptions of multiple online audience segments. We illustrate the potential of these methods with a study of how vaccination is discussed among Dutch Twitter users.

Highlights Analysis of the Dutch Twitter debate on vaccination using digital methods. Identification of online communities and mapping their perceptions and interactions. Communities include (but not limited to) health professionals and anti-establishment. Anti-establishment most negative about vaccination; health info hardly reaches them. Scripts to retrieve, process, and analyze Twitter data available for future research.

World-wide a number of groups have sought ways to incorporate health messages into television entertainment like popular drama and soap serials. In the Netherlands, the Heart Foundation incorporated its cardiovascular health message in several episodes of a popular Dutch hospital serial called Medisch Centrum West. To obtain greater insight into the impact of this so-called 'entertainment-education (E & E) strategy', an evaluation study was carried out. Medisch Centrum West was both entertaining and informative at the same time. Although viewers were well aware that the programme included a health message, they did not find it intrusive to their enjoyment of the storyline. It was interesting to learn that fans were more tolerant and positive towards the E & E strategy than non-fans. Age, sex and education level explained only 5% of the variance.

Entertainment-education (EE) is a communication strategy that uses popular media to engage with audiences on prosocial topics such as health, social tolerance and sustainability. The purpose of EE serials on radio, television or the internet is to introduce new ideas, norms and practices by means of storytelling, as well as to offer points of engagement for audiences to talk about the themes raised by the intervention. However, in today’s media landscape, it has become increasingly difficult to captivate audiences as they have fragmented across channels and have started to create and circulate content themselves. The concept of spreadable media allows us to deal with fragmentation and user-generated content in productive ways, as it recognizes the role of autonomous audience members in shaping the flows of media content in the online networks that underlie today’s media landscape. In this article, we introduce spreadable EE: an innovative approach that builds on transmedia storytelling strategies to reach and captivate target audiences for a longer period of time, and that entails collaboration with online platforms, communities and social influencers to stimulate meaningful conversations. We enhance EE's theoretical, empirical and practical traditions with insights about how today’s audiences have come to engage with media and propose strategic approaches to create and evaluate spreadable EE.

This Dutch study focused on how health communication professionals and television professionals collaborate in the design and implementation of entertainment-education (E-E) television programs. A conceptualization of the collaboration process is offered by drawing upon Bourdieu's general theory of practice. An E-E collaboration is a strange kind of marriage between these two fields. Health communication professionals are perceived by television professionals as turtles (trustworthy and solid, but slow), while television professionals are perceived by health communication professionals as peacocks (arrogant, with big egos and preening their feathers). These differences can be resolved by jointly creating a new frame of reference and constituting a new genre of E-E television.