Transcription - PART 4
Hello, and welcome to part 4 in our video series about social media for Canadian dietitians. I’m Brittany Thomas
I’m Nicola Jackson
And I’m Liz Higgins
We are graduate students in the Nutrition Communication program at Ryerson.
Together, we will be guiding you through the evidence on the effectiveness of social media for improving health. You can expect to learn about social media in health promotion and chronic disease management.
We’ll also talk about the evolving nature of social media and how it can reach many populations.
And, lastly, we’ll discuss how to measure social media performance in health promotion.
As you may have noticed, social media platforms are diverse, and constantly evolving. If you’re just joining us in Part 4, let’s review what we mean by social media. It’s defined as a form of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content.
Now, let’s talk about the research. We’ve done the nitty gritty work of searching and reviewing the evidence, and breaking it down into key findings, so you don’t have to. We choose to focus on the highest quality of evidence, which means we only included systematic literature reviews. We found several benefits of using social media in healthcare.
Specifically, we found that social media can help:
- Increase interaction with others
- Create and distribute tailored health information
- Increase accessibility to health information
- Provide emotional support through peer or social interaction
- Create a medium for public health surveillance
- Has a potential to influence public policy
Now, I’m going to turn it over to Nicola who will share with you the evidence on social media for health promotion.
Thanks Brittany! We set out to understand how Social Media is effective in distributing information, changing behaviour, and improving overall health.
Seven reviews have been published where researchers use various platforms of social media for some aspect of their study. The results are varied.
But the most common uses of social media are providing education, providing social support, helping with self management, and helping tailor information for the target population.
Healthcare providers recognize that text based information may not be reaching all populations.
Using social media provides a new way to distribute information.
The main findings of our search were on engagement and health outcomes.
Two reviews found engagement in health promotion improved when a Social Media platform was used.
Three reviews found improvements in at least one health outcome.
These included weight loss or general health outcomes.
Researchers also found that 89% of participants improved behaviours when social media was used.
In a different review, 100% of the studies reported weight loss when social media was a form of engagement.
That same review also saw 60% of the participants lose a statistically significant amount of weight.
Social media is still fairly new in health promotion research, and newer platforms have yet to be studied.
However, evidence shows promising results, and research should continue to move forward to explore how social media can reach audiences regardless of education, race, or ethnicity.
Now let’s pass it over to Liz, to learn about the perks of Social Media for chronic disease management.
Thanks Nicola! Today, most reviews measuring the effectiveness of social media on chronic disease look specifically at cancer management. That being said, many other chronic diseases are also studied like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
Key findings show us three areas that social media can help people manage chronic disease.
Number one: Social media is used to supply reliable information from the healthcare field to many target audiences.
One review found that using social media can increase a person’s knowledge, support, and self management of disease. And because of this, people feel more empowered, have higher self-esteem, and are more likely to accept their disease diagnosis.
Number Two: Social media may help change health related behaviours.
Results from a recent review found that almost half of social media interventions resulted in positive disease changes.
For example, 100% of Facebook based interventions helped participants lose weight and increase physical activity.
On the other hand, Twitter wasn’t as useful for promoting behaviour change, and actually distracted participants from other more useful platforms - like using smartphone apps to track activity.
Number Three: Social media can reach diverse audiences with chronic disease.
Studies found that people who use social media to help manage disease may not have social support in their lives. For this reason, participation in online platforms is extremely important.
Similar to health promotion, the use and effectiveness of social media in chronic disease management does show promise.
But keep in mind- we still need more research to accurately measure the impact of newer social media platforms.
As you can see, social media can be a helpful tool for both health promotion and disease management.
However, there are some limitations in the research we looked at. Some of the reviews included studies on older forms of social media, such as chat rooms or discussion boards. And this is because social media is rapidly evolving, which makes it challenging for the research to keep pace. For instance, none of the reviews included studies on some of the newer social media platforms, including, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. However, these studies are still relevant because all forms of social media share a common purpose, which is to encourage participation and engagement with the user.
Now that you have an understanding of the how social media can be used to improve health, let’s discuss how to go about measuring and evaluating the performance of social media. This is especially important if you plan to use social media for health promotion.
In Part 2 of this video series, you may remember that we learned about Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. Just to refresh your memory, there are 4 KPIs, and they are:
1.INSIGHT
2.EXPOSURE
3.REACH
4.ENGAGEMENT
Tracking KPIs in health promotion is critical because it allows organizations to evaluate and improve their use of social media. Please refer to Part 2 for more detailed information about how to interpret KPIs.
Before we leave you today, let’s do a recap of some of the key things we learned from this video:
First, we learned that social media is effective in health promotion, distributing information, changing behaviour, and improving overall health.
Second, we learned that social media is effective in chronic disease management by providing patients with reliable information and social supports.
Third, we also learned that social media is effective in reaching diverse populations in a low cost and timely manner.
And fourth, keep in mind that social media platforms are constantly changing, and this creates a lag between the platforms being studied and those that are currently in use by the public.
And finally, stay tuned, as further research is needed to enrich our understanding of how social media can improve health, and to establish best practices for using social media in healthcare.
This concludes part 4 of the video series. Thanks for watching.