Developing custom Facebook quizzes as health education tools

According to CNN, in March 2010, Facebook became the most popular website on the Internet, more visited than Google. Facebook currently has over 500 million active users. The largest demographic is ~35 and women over 54 are the fastest growing segment. Applications such as games and quizzes can have 300 million visitors monthly.

We decided to test Facebook as a health education tool by custom-building two quizzes (writing code rather than using the “create a quiz” option).

“Gee, that tastes funny”, targeted to moms and focusing on common household poisons and safety, and “Stop it, you're killing me!”, a humorous trivia quiz for all ages, were built and launched in the same week. After finishing each quiz participants could post a commitment, essentially a promise of good behavior, as a badge to their profile.

Building a custom Facebook quiz that deviated from the site's offered format and could appear on a fan page proved challenging and required much custom coding. Consequently, the quizzes were initially difficult to locate on the page and had only 100 users in the first month. A better coding strategy that allowed more prominent placement was discovered and subsequently nearly 500 quizzes have been completed.

Facebook has enormous potential to reach highly targeted audiences and engage with consumers about health behaviors, but frequent changes to the site's infrastructure create challenges. Strategy must be fluid and evolve with the site's changes and include using internal ads to drive usage.