Comparing Tobacco Control Social Media Strategies to Reach Youth

Background:  Social media presents an opportunity for public health programs to reach large audiences at a low cost. However, many other marketers are also choosing to use this low cost channel, creating a large amount of competition for the audience’s attention on sites such as Facebook. Public health practitioners need to understand social media best practices that maximize exposure, dosage, reach and interaction on their pages to effectively engage with their audience through social media.

Program background:  This session presents new data on the effectiveness of distinct Facebook strategies evaluated by measuring the interactivity and reach of each strategy. Data from two teen tobacco counter-marketing campaigns will be presented: 1)     The Southern Nevada Health District’s “XPOZ” campaign has a small marketing budget and focuses on low-cost social media strategies to deliver counter-marketing messages to hard-to-reach youth. 2)     Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth’s “ydouthink” campaign is a statewide media campaign to reach all teens, using social media to reinforce its traditional media strategy. Both programs have been in place for over seven years, but only began using a comprehensive social media strategy within the past 18 months. The differences between the two programs in size, geographic area and use of traditional media, allowed evaluators to examine the effectiveness of social media strategies in two distinct contexts.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Eight different social media strategies were used on each Facebook “page” for two weeks at a time. While all of the eight strategies ultimately led to a health message, their strategies to lead youth to the health message were not always health-based. All of the strategies were used at least twice on each of the two program pages. The effectiveness of each strategy was measured through Facebook Insights, a free analytic tool available to all Facebook Page users. “Likes” and “Unique Visitors” were compared, as well as the average measure of weekly “People Talking About This” between the end of the first and second weeks of the trial. “Likes” were calculated by subtracting “unlikes” from “likes” to account for any strategies that may have a negative impact. Each of the 3 variables were weighted equally to form an “effectiveness” score for each of the tested strategies.

Conclusions: Effective strategies included 1) mixing lifestyle with health education, and 2) using contests that prompt users to post their own text about the program. Some of the strategies that were not effective included 1) creative content creation contests (ie: t-shirt or video contests) and 2) purely health-based posts. With these strategies, the XPOZ and ydouthink Facebook pages frequently achieved a higher “talking about this” statistic than larger, national efforts, despite having much smaller budgets. In addition, there is preliminary evidence that use of effective strategies has a cumulative effect, increasing the necessity for programs using social media to understand which strategies are effective.

Implications for research and/or practice:  By identifying the best practices for tobacco prevention on Facebook, attendees will feel more comfortable using the technology and their programs will be more successful by reaching a larger audience in a manner that stimulates interaction with their audience.