Building effective social media for public health

Background: Social media is now heavily used by health organizations for various public health purposes—promoting health awareness, enabling patients to express service concerns, and building support groups and communities—among other things. Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of social media, we focus on contents posted in online social media platforms. We classify contents into specific types, and our evaluative measures include the number of subscribers, amount of discussions, and network diversity. Methods: We extract contents from Facebook pages developed by hospitals in Missouri. The contents extracted are wall-posts written by the hospital's Facebook administrator(s) and subscribers to the hospital's Facebook page. We evaluate the effectiveness of different content types based on descriptive statistics and two network diversity indicators. Results: According to our sampling, more than 40% of hospitals in Missouri have built a Facebook page to increase communication with patients. The contents in these Facebook pages can be classified into three types—(1) knowledge; (2) expression; and (3) community-building. Each of these content types serves as a network tie to engage Facebook subscribers, with different degree of effectiveness. Knowledge posts attract more attention (as reflected by the number of “likes”), but expression and community posts generate more in-depth discussions (as reflected by the number of “follow-up posts”). Different contents are associated with different values of social and geographical diversity. Discussions: Social media has been widely integrated into Internet applications, including mobile technologies. Given its immense popularity, social media carries great potentials to increase population health. To realize this potential, scholars and practitioners need to understand how social media may address the population's social needs, but also its limitations. Our research has yielded useful findings; yet, it is limited to hospitals' Facebook pages in Missouri. We aspire to generalize these findings to other social platforms, health organizations and geographical areas in further research.