Developing Online Games and Custom Facebook Quizzes as Health Education Tools

Background:  According to CNN, in March 2010, Facebook became the most popular website on the Internet, more visited than Google. Facebook currently has over 350 million active users globally. Six months ago, there were 250 million. The largest demographic is ~35 and women over 54 are the fastest growing segment. Applications such as games and quizzes can have 250 million visitors monthly.

Program background:  We decided to test Facebook as a health education tool by custom-building quizzes (writing code rather than using the “create a quiz” option) and developing an online game accessible through a Facebook fan page. 

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Two quizzes were built and launched in the same week. At the end of each quiz participants could post a commitment, essentially a promise of good behavior, or badge to their profile. We also created a simple, highly visual online game. All three launched from a fan page. Building a custom Facebook quiz that deviated from the site’s preferred format and could easily appear on a fan page proved challenging. Consequently, the quizzes were initially difficult to locate on the fan page and had only 100 users in the first month.

Conclusions:  The online game, which had its own URL, was easier to access and generated hundreds of visits within the first few weeks. The game was accessed more through its own URL than through the fan page. A better coding strategy that allows for more prominent placement was discovered  and implemented after the launch along with a strategy for promoting the quizzes within Facebook.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Enormous potential to reach targeted audiences and engage with consumers about health behaviors, but proper software development is critical.