Social Media Sites to Communicate Evidence-Based Strategies for Healthy Living: Findings From the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living

Background: Outreach to parents as part of school-based health promotion has had limited success and is difficult to sustain. Social media offers a new method to reach the public, including families and parents; however little evaluation research has been conducted, especially among groups with health disparities.  The Travis County Coordinated Approach To Child Health (CATCH) project made use of social media to communicate evidence-based messages and strategies to promote healthy living among families and community members. This report provides formative and process evaluation results from our early experience.

Program background: The development and implementation of the communications plan required a large collaboration, including 4 planning phases: 1) creation of a trans-disciplinary committee to draft the communications plan to address audience analysis, content development communications channels, and website maintenance; 2) review of websites by communications experts and partners; 3) receipt of approval from UTHealth communications officials; and 4) collection and review of content submissions.  Blogger was selected as the media channel for blog entries (www.blogger.com). Twitter and Facebook were also selected to provide frequent updates on content specific events or research findings. After six months of development, the social media sites were launched on January 4, 2010.  Tenets from social marketing and social cognitive theory (e.g., behavioral journalism) were used to inform the development of blog posts.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Google Analytics was used as an evaluation tool to gain insight into blog traffic and obtain information on marketing and dissemination effectiveness.  Between January 4 and April 30, 2010, 44 blog stories were posted, including topics on nutrition (n = 21), physical activity (n = 13), parenting, lifestyle, research, and public health.  Preliminary results indicate 1,547 visits to the blog since the launch, including readership from 22 countries.  More than half of the readers have returned one or more times (59.1%) and 40.6% are new. Most viewed topics have included new or alternative ways to increase physical activity or how to improve dietary behaviors; many have generated provocative viewer discussions.  Process evaluation results from low-income and culturally diverse parents indicate the stories are easy to understand and are personable. 

Conclusions: Lessons learned include evaluation of social media use for health promotion can be achieved with an appropriate communications plan, and the selection of provocative topics and intertwining evidence-based health information with personal stories is the key to generating reader interest.  In addition, a team approach to writing content can make the process work more efficiently.  To date, we are pleased with the content and viewer response to our social marketing strategies and intend to continue both new content production and evaluation.

Implications for research and/or practice: Social media sites are a resourceful mechanism for disseminating evidence-based information to the public, including parents, students, educators, community members, and stakeholders.