Developing and Disseminating eBaby4U: Using Social Media to Optimize Early Infant Feeding Outcomes Among Resource-Limited African American Teen Mothers

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis: Resource-limited African American teen mothers face increased barriers related to optimizing early infant feeding behavior (EIFB) outcomes, as compared to mothers who are older and have higher levels of income and education. This is cause for concern given that “racial/ethnic disparities in childhood obesity may be determined by factors that operate at the earliest stages of life” (Taveras et al, 2010). Such factors can be exacerbated for resource-limited minority teen mothers and their infants as poverty and younger age of birth mother are associated with a number of non-optimal EIFB outcomes including non-breastfeeding, low infant-related nutritional knowledge, and mistimed introduction of solid foods to infants. Despite a small number of eHealth programs for new mothers (e.g., Just In Time Parenting; Text4baby), there are considerable gaps in technology-based EIFB outreach targeting resource-limited African American teen mothers. Three research questions are driving the eBaby4U project, including:  (1) How do we harness social media to optimize EIFB outcomes among resource-limited African American teen mothers?; (2) How do we adapt existing content so that it is culturally relevant to the target population?; and (3) How do we disseminate the adapted content so that it is accessible to the target population?

Methods: To address these questions, the eBaby Project is: (1) adapting Just in Time Parenting (JITP) (http://www.parentinginfo.org/) content into culturally relevant eBaby4U parenting education videos for the target population; (2) pilot-testing the eBaby4U videos among the eBaby Community Advisory Board (CAB), whose members are resource-limited first-time African American teen/young mothers ages 16-20 years old; (3) distributing the eBaby4U videos across social media platforms popular among the target population (e.g., YouTube, Facebook); (4) optimizing the cultural relevance of JITP’s website for the target population; and (5) developing additional eBaby4U content (e.g., logo and website) and pilot-testing among the eBaby CAB.

Results: With expertise from the eBaby CAB, we have piloted the eBaby4U logo, website, and two of the eight videos to date, with the remaining videos in production. We believe this method is essential to the development of an integrated approach to branding eBaby4U content in order to increase its cultural relevance  to the target population.

Conclusions: We discuss implications for adapting existing JITP content into culturally relevant eBaby4U content for resource-limited African American teen mothers and disseminating this content across multiple social media platforms popular among the target population.

Implications for research and/or practice: Innovative efforts to harness social media to optimize EIFB outcomes among resource-limited African American teen mothers are vitally needed. Such efforts must be: (1) Culturally tailored to the target population; (2) Designed so that they are ‘mobile responsive’ or otherwise easily disseminated across multiple platforms to maximize ‘visits’ and ‘likes’ and minimize bounce rates; (3) Designed so that they are dynamic, given that ‘fresh’ content is integral to retaining audiences on social media sites; (4) Evaluated using tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to determine effectiveness; (5) Sustainable over time (i.e., funded over the long-term to maintain the site and update the content).