Social Media Campaign as a Tool for Patient Education of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion: Digital Health Campaign on Osteoporosis Knowledge

Introduction

The current state of technological advances and social media presents novel opportunities to reach the public and create awareness about any health-related issues. Society has come far from public health campaigns based on printed flyers and televised interviews or presentations. It is now possible to reach a specific target group depending on the social network used, and more importantly, directly into the public’s hands through electronic devices.

Nowadays, media resources are one of the main pillars in health education, promotion, and disease prevention. However, with an excessive amount of information available and the question of source reliability, the need to develop well-structured and well-founded campaigns for the public by health professionals arises. These campaigns must be comprehensible, attractive, and a motivation factor to the audience for them to be successful, useful, and objective in promoting health and potentially preventing disease development.

This chapter aims to present digital social media public health campaigns to communicate and inform the public about health promotion and disease prevention, specifically regarding osteoporosis. An Instagram campaign was conducted, after which a survey was applied to measure the knowledge of the public on the subject following their education from the posts made throughout the campaign. This chapter will discuss the general aspects of osteoporosis and the importance of its prevention, various established patient education interventions, the campaign design process and the results obtained with the public health measure executed, aspects about social media campaigns and their importance, and limitations, recommendations, and research directions regarding social media campaigns for patient education.