Social media and applications to health behavior
Section snippets
Social media: an opportunity to change health
With nearly 2 billion active users of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms across the world (http://www.statista.com/), social media is an important part of daily life for many people. Used as an umbrella term, ‘social media’ describes web applications that allow users to generate, share, receive and comment on content via social networks (e.g. Facebook); blogs and microblogs (e.g. WordPress and Twitter); content communities (e.g. YouTube); collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia); and virtual
Facebook: forums, groups and games
Facebook has been the most popular social media platform featuring in health behavior change research. Studies have targeted a wide range of health behaviors, including weight loss [5, 6•, 7, 8, 9], physical activity [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], sexual health [16, 17, 18, 19], smoking cessation [14], mental health [20], food safety [21], disease self-management [22], and tobacco chewing [23]. Target populations for these interventions have varied. Some studies have covered the general population [
Twitter: social support and data mining
Although rarely used as a health-change tool on its own, Twitter has been successfully applied as a supplementary aid to increase success of online interventions by enhancing social engagement. Twitter boosted the spread of information and strengthened social networks in an online quit smoking program [28] and enhanced social support for weight loss [29, 30, 31] and the ‘#PlankADay’ exercise challenge [32].
In addition, Twitter has been mined as a source of public and searchable data relating to
Online social networks and free-standing apps: where the numbers are
Many online health and wellbeing sites incorporate social media by allowing users to log in with their Facebook account, and to post their progress to Facebook and Twitter — for example, Dietbet [38] and Daily Challenge [39]. However some sites also incorporate online social networking features within their own platforms, such the provision of ‘friending’ forums and pages for blogging and other in-house content sharing. Such sites have attracted users numbering in the hundreds of thousands (e.g.
Social media for health interventions: a fascinating and evolving field
A growing body of evidence supports the notion that online social platforms can effectuate health behavior change. However — like most tools — social media has its strengths and weaknesses. Nuances of social interactions, user familiarity, privacy, platform cost and usability, and engagement must be considered.
From a social perspective, social media has benefits not offered by offline health programs. For weight loss and exercise support, a built-in social element has been shown to enhance
The future of online social media for health
The use of social media platforms for health applications is a complex and quickly evolving field. To date, a wide variety of health behaviors have been targeted, though physical activity has been particularly popular. Future efforts across a variety of research fronts are warranted. In future, it will be useful to scrutinize which types of interactions most support health behavior change and how to achieve sustained engagement will be critical. Furthermore, working with diverse groups with
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
Carol Maher is supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Australian National Heart Foundation.
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