Objective To assess the effects of using health social media on different days of the working week on web activity.

Design Individually randomised controlled parallel group superiority trial.

Setting Twitter and Weibo.

Participants
194 Cochrane Schizophrenia Group full reviews with an abstract and
plain language summary web page. There were no human participants.

Interventions
Three randomly ordered slightly different messages (maximum of 140
characters), each containing a short URL to the freely accessible
summary page, were sent on specific times on a single day. Each of these
messages sent on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was compared
with the one sent on Monday.

Outcome
The primary outcome was visits to the relevant Cochrane summary web
page at 1 week. Secondary outcomes were other metrics of web activity at
1 week.

Results
There was no evidence that disseminating microblogs on different days
of the working week resulted in any differences in target website
activity as measured by Google Analytics (n=194, all page views,
adjusted ratios of geometric means 0.86 (95% CI 0.63 to 1.18), 0.88 (95%
CI 0.64 to 1.21), 0.88 (95% CI 0.65 to 1.21), 0.91 (95% CI 0.66 to
1.24) for Tuesday–Friday, respectively, overall p=0.89). There were
consistent findings for all outcomes. However, activity on the review
site substantially increased compared with weeks preceding the
intervention.

Conclusion
There are no clear differences in the effect when 1 weekday is compared
with another, but our study suggests that using microblogging social
media such as Twitter and Weibo do increase information-seeking
behaviour on health. Tweet any day but do Tweet.