Twelve tips for public health education using social media.

Morgan Sehdev,Nicholos Joseph,Katherine G Nabel,Melody Huang,Kruti Vora

doi:10.15694/mep.2021.000139.1

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. With nearly half the world's population using social media, platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have become popular sources of information gathering and sharing for the general public. In medicine, social media is increasingly used to educate patients due its wide reach and interactive nature. Early studies showed that these social media-based initiatives can even promote behavioral change by increasing public knowledge and self-efficacy. Several barriers such as time and technical skills, however, prevent healthcare workers from using social media platforms to promote public health education. The following twelve tips may help reduce these barriers and create more opportunities for patients to easily access quality medical information on social media. Creating an effective public health education platform on social media involves identifying clear goals, understanding the social context of all messaging, recruiting a motivated team, creating a style guide, vetting content for accuracy, and interacting with social media followers. These tips will help build an accurate and quality social media public health education campaign.

Highlights

Social media platforms have recently become more accessible and heavily utilized by the general population
Public health initiatives geared towards educating the general public have spread to platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (Kite et al, 2016; Gough et al, 2017; Seltzer et al, 2017)
Studies have demonstrated that social media based initiatives may increase public knowledge and self-efficacy in a way that promotes behavioral change (Xu et al, 2016; An, Ji and Zhang, 2017; Daley et al, 2018); time and necessary skills are often cited as barriers preventing healthcare workers from using social media platforms to promote public health education (Antheunis, Tates and Nieboer, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

Social media platforms have recently become more accessible and heavily utilized by the general population. Hoping to provide a source of understandable yet data-driven information about the developing COVID-19 pandemic for the general public, a group of senior medical students created the @FutureMDvsCOVID platform During this process, we found that there was little guidance in the literature on how to successfully design and implement a social media campaign for public health education. Tip 10: Design your social media platform using descriptive and informative language and set a timeline for posting content In order for your message to be impactful, design your platform such that it 1) clearly states your goals, 2) highlights why your platform is unique, and 3) states your qualifications for sharing such content This will help your audience determine why they should follow you. With regards to any engagements with followers on social media, healthcare professionals should remain honest, as a core principle both in medicine and in guidelines for social media use (Kind, 2015)

Conclusion

Findings

Notes On Contributors