Table 4 Responses to open-text question asking final thoughts on social media monitoring or integrated analysis

Increasing resourcing and collaboration

A need for collaboration, and coordination at global at regional levels

Currently, there isn't a data intelligence department or team or capabilities for the technical units. Social media is just one piece of the puzzle, we would like to know what is happening in terms of information and how this affects our department and activities and strategize with research backing our decisions

To excel in this area, we need to have trained dedicated resources at country offices to work on this area themselves and to work with the national counterparts to strengthen their capacities as well

Recognising value

Several comments related to managerial barriers and the need to build capacity of those managing infodemic teams to recognise the value

Managers tend to expect way more results for way less money. Social media analysis is a multidisciplinary venture: data, linguistics, psychology, media-expertise, all is needed to optimally get the potential. This makes it a challenge to acquire and maintain the teams

I am needing support to help demonstrate value for local public health units because the comms teams are resisting. National associations have an AMAZING social media presence with comments posted—but not being analyzed or integrated to my knowledge

Advocacy and strategic leadership

Comments in this theme addressed advocacy and leadership needed to advance infodemic management. This included advocacy with platforms

Sometimes we have the management support and the colleagues willingness to do the analysis or provide the data, and also there are existing platforms that can provide most of our requirements, however the legal process is not as fast as we need or teams can not use or move forward with a platform for legal processes

We need help to PRESSURE these social media platforms, to open up access to RESEARCHERS—so in turn we can better help make things better in their platform

Most managers in surveillance programs or national associations that utilize social media are not going past the "counting clicks" part. They aren't using digital data for analysis and recommendation sharing. I look forward to have this advanced in 2023 in collaboration with local, regional and national orgs.:)

Digital and technical barriers

Some respondents discussed wanting better access to data and to better platforms. Others discussed challenges with internet and VPN access, as well as a lack of data for certain priority groups

It's still very hard to obtain USABLE data from various social media platforms—TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. For example, we tried to create a crawler for Instagram, to be able to better monitor the infodemic situation in that platform. Instead, we were hit by various very harsh anti-bot measures. We should not need to create the crawler at the first place, but since these platforms are so bent on closing off their places, we had to

It's very difficult to get data based on rase or ethnicity. My agency targets the Black American audience, which has lower vaccination rates that other communities. We can't filter users by race/ethnicity, and there are very few community reports about vaccination rates that do this. So, a lot of it involves making guesses about race, or using other identifiers to assume their race. I wish there was a way to get more data based on race

Teaching and evidence

These comments included support for those teaching university level students, as well as calls for computer literacy and social inoculation

I would like to know any relevant publications which use social media monitoring tools, and how to develop materials for teaching social media monitoring in basic level to equip health cadres with ability to track mis/disinformation

I teach MPH public health policy, and the importance of the use of good data to justify the policy action. So I am primarily instructing my students on access to use these resources. This educational route was not really mentioned in your survey

Technical training needs

Respondents detailed technical training needs for themselves and the sector, and called for training to be offered in a range of modalities

It has been hard to find a way to integrate what the brand needs versus what the technical units need

Better to work on the following: These are the key social media metrics that should not miss from your social media analysis report: post ranks across all channels. number of posts. post engagement and engagement rate. all campaigns. total campaign engagement. number of posts per campaign. posts volumes by campaign (numerically and percentage wise)

I would like more training through MOOC