Salud America! is a national network created to engage Latino researchers, health professionals and community leaders in actions to reduce Latino childhood obesity. An online survey of 148 Salud America! network members investigated relationships between (1) their levels of engagement with the network, (2) self- and collective-efficacy, and (3) behavioral intentions to engage in advocacy for policies that can help reduce Latino childhood obesity. Analyses of these data found that higher levels of Salud America! engagement was associated with collective-advocacy efficacy-greater confidence in organized group advocacy as a way of advancing policies to reduce Latino childhood obesity. A multiple regression analysis found that this sense of collective-efficacy moderately predicted intentions to engage in advocacy behaviors. Salud America! engagement levels were less strongly associated with members' confidence in their personal ability to be an effective advocate, yet this sense of self-efficacy was a very strong predictor of a behavioral intention to advocate. Based on these findings, new online applications aimed at increasing self- and collective-efficacy through peer modeling are being developed for Salud America! in order to help individuals interested in Latino childhood obesity prevention to connect with each other and with opportunities for concerted local actions in their communities.

In response to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in 2020, the national Salud America! Latino health equity program at University of Texas Health San Antonio applied its digital content curation model to create and communicate culturally relevant news, stories, and data to raise immediate awareness and generate action against the pandemic’s inequitable impacts on U.S. Latinos. Digital content curation is an emerging public health communication strategy using a systematic, refined process to create tailored online and social health messages and prevent mixed messaging and information overload for an audience. Salud America! curated culturally relevant digital content to raise awareness of the pandemic’s inequitable impact on Latinos and promote solutions for health equity, with a unique combination of website blog posts exploring pandemic effects on Latinos, peer-modeled stories of people responding meaningfully to the crisis, podcast episodes and Tweetchats engaging people in COVID-19 solutions for Latinos, action tools and campaigns equipping school leaders to make grassroots changes, and supplying advocates with a local data tool on health equity identification. The digital health promotion intervention produced curated content that spiked program website traffic to record highs, revealing the model’s effectiveness in increasing exposure to culturally relevant and action-oriented information for a novel topic.

Background Latinx people comprise 18% of the US adult population and a large share of youth and continue to experience inequities that perpetuate health disparities. To engage Latinx people in advocacy for health equity based on this population’s heavy share of smartphone, social media, and Twitter users, Salud America! launched the #SaludTues Tweetchat series. In this paper, we explore the use of #SaludTues to promote advocacy for Latinx health equity. Objective This study aims to understand how #SaludTues Tweetchats are used to promote dissemination of culturally relevant information on social determinants of health, to determine whether tweetchats serve to drive web traffic to the Salud America! website, and to understand who participates in #SaludTues Tweetchats and what we can learn about the participants. We also aim to share our own experiences and present a step-by-step guide of how tweetchats are planned, developed, promoted, and executed. Methods We explored tweetchat data collected between 2014 and 2018 using Symplur and Google Analytics to identify groups of stakeholders and web traffic. Network analysis and mapping tools were also used to derive insights from this series of chats. Results We conducted 187 chats with 24,609 reported users, 177,466 tweets, and more than 1.87 billion impressions using the hashtag #SaludTues during this span, demonstrating effective dissemination of and exposure to culturally relevant information. Traffic to the Salud America! website was higher on Tuesdays than any other day of the week, suggesting that #SaludTues Tweetchats acted effectively as a website traffic–driving tool. Most participants came from advocacy organizations (165/1000, 16.5%) and other health care–related organizations (162/1000, 16.2%), whereas others were unknown users (147/1000, 14.7%) and individual users outside of the health care sector (117/1000, 11.7%). The majority of participants were located in Texas, California, New York, and Florida, all states with high Latinx populations. Conclusions Carefully planned, culturally relevant tweetchats such as #SaludTues can be a powerful tool for public health practitioners and advocates to engage audiences on Twitter around health issues, advocacy, and policy solutions for Latino health equity. Further information is needed to determine the effect that #SaludTues Tweetchats have on self- and collective efficacy for advocacy in the area of Latino health equity.

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