Abstract
AbstractIn recent years, social media have become a popular tool for health communication. Healthcare professionals in many areas already take advantage of such media to communicate important messages to their audiences. Facebook pages are widely used for this purpose. This study analyzes three Brazilian Facebook pages related to cancer. The objective of this work is to explore whether there are communication patterns that generate greater public engagement. The pages selected for this study are the following: Quimioterapia e Beleza (Chemotherapy & Beauty), Fundacao do Câncer (Brazilian Cancer Foundation) and Cabelegria (Hair and Happiness). We collected posts on these three pages over a period of six months, totaling 1,243 posts. Content analysis was used to classify the posts into categories. The categories that generated the greatest engagement were “testimonies”, “solidarity” and “anniversaries”. In two out of the three analyzed Facebook pages, those categories were not the most frequent; the potentia...
Highlights
Social media have become firmly established across sociodemographic groups (Korda & Itani, 2013)
This study analyzes three Brazilian Facebook pages related to cancer to explore whether there are communication patterns that generate greater public engagement
The objective of this work is to explore whether there are communication patterns that are more attractive to the audience and generate greater public engagement
Summary
Social media have become firmly established across sociodemographic groups (Korda & Itani, 2013). Social media, characterized by their interactive and participatory nature, have become a popular tool for health communication (Abramson, Keefe, & Chou, 2015). Some of the key benefits of using social media for health communication are: increased social interaction with others; information becomes more available, shared and tailored; boost of public health surveillance; and potential to influence health policy (Moorhead et al, 2013). In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States launched social mediabased health education initiatives on Facebook to increase women’s knowledge of breast health and breast cancer (Theiss, Burke, Cory, & Fairley, 2016)
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