By CJ Kuechler
When you open a social media app like TikTok or Instagram, it is difficult to avoid the swells of people talking about their health and wellness journeys or providing suggestions on how to be healthier. If you have a health concern or question, there is a TikTok or Instagram reel for every topic.
Social media has become a vital tool for discussing health and wellness more openly and helping people find community around an often-sensitive topic. According to one survey, 20 percent of Americans go on TikTok before consulting their doctor when seeking treatments for a health condition.
The accessibility of healthcare discussions on social media is a double-edged sword, though. While these platforms have made conversations about health more open, they have also contributed largely to the rise of healthcare skepticism and misinformation. In fact, a recent survey by The Physicians Foundation reported 86 percent of physicians felt that the frequency of medical misinformation and/or disinformation has largely increased in the last five years.
Given the rise of social media as an information source, healthcare organizations must go where their patients are and make their presence known online. Utilizing social media to combat healthcare misinformation, communicate accurate health advice, and keep on top of health trends that may affect patient decisions is now an important part of their role.
How Does Social Media Spread Health Advice and Misinformation?
Social media platforms are built to keep people engaged. They want users to scroll longer, post more, and continue sharing content. It also rewards content that keeps people engaged— no matter if the post offers credible information or not.
Generally, social media platforms largely prioritize user engagement over accuracy. This means that emotionally charged or controversial content, like health-related topics, can be highly engaging, leading algorithms to amplify similar content.
While social media platforms have tools to help take down or moderate the spread of misinformation, these tools are fallible, especially as the amount of content on social media is vast and ever-growing.
Why Is Social Media Health Content Convincing Patients?
When using social media platforms, content is pushed to users based on interests. What a user likes, comments on, or watches (without scrolling away) is all collected as data to help the platforms understand its users better. The more people engage with content, the more similar content they get, creating an algorithm-driven echo chamber.
When a patient is inundated with health-related content, it can become hard to discern if a post offers credible information. On TikTok alone, more than half of all the top trending videos offering mental health advice contain misinformation, according to an investigation by The Guardian. Additionally, a study by UChicago Medicine, found that 44 percent of videos on TikTok about sinuses contained non-factual information.
Users often continue engaging with deceptive content because influencers resonate with audiences who seek relatable voices in a sea of medical information. Influencers can be very convincing in appearing more credible than they are in reality. There are also major financial incentives for them to keep producing popular content, so they keep sharing health-related posts, no matter if the posts are medically accurate or not.
These social media personalities can spread their healthcare opinions widely because they are able to elicit strong emotions. One-third of young adults reported that content creators without medical training have influenced their health decisions, according to a survey from earlier this year.
Beyond influencers, there are many doctors, healthcare experts, and organizations who have built platforms online, combating misleading health advice and sharing their expertise. Healthcare organizations must be able to communicate on social media and navigate chatter online, utilizing similar skills online personalities use.
TikTok by Dr. Mike Varshavski, a practicing Board Certified Family Medicine doctor, reacting to people’s health advice online
Healthcare Organizations’ Role on Social Media
As people seek out and become overwhelmed by health information on social media, healthcare organizations need to meet patients where they are to build credibility, connect with their community, and combat misinformation.
For healthcare organizations, social media can enhance organizational visibility and public image. Many patients see social presence as an indicator of advanced care and an engaged health system. Being on social media also provides direct communication with patients and communities, allowing organizations to monitor community feedback.
Using social media is useful for sharing all kinds of information, updates, and resources, but it can also be especially essential when there is a crisis, allowing organizations to provide updates and guidelines to the public in a centralized location.
Optimizing Social Media for Healthcare
For health systems or hospitals to get the most out of social media, it is imperative to establish and promote the accounts to their wider community, so people know the health system is available online. The more connected healthcare organizations are online, the more likely patients and community members may receive their information.
Organizations should include what social media accounts they have on company material, such as websites or advertisements, and can also use paid platform tools to boost the reach of their accounts or individual posts. The more eyes, the better.
Social media is a great tool for organizations to stay on top of current healthcare discussions online, enabling organizations to anticipate concerns and craft relevant content for their platforms. Hospitals like Brigham and Women’s use their social media pages to share medical knowledge and provide health tips to their patients, explain new health studies, or provide patient stories to build their reputation.
Healthcare organizations can also take inspiration from social media trends to help spread their messages, using popular songs or skits to create trendy content that could help grow their engagement. For example, the American Heart Association utilized Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” to create a TikTok about what beat to follow when performing CPR. Given patients’ strong online presence and the potential reach posts can have, an organization’s social media account should serve as a primary channel for sharing information and communicating with its community.
TikTok from the American Heart Association about the right CPR tempo to the beat of “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar
Additionally, organizations should also recognize and highlight patients’ efforts to learn about their health. Using an open and encouraging tone, similar to influencers, can increase a patient’s willingness to accept more research-driven advice. These interactions can also provide an opportunity to incorporate social media literacy education.
Collaborations with trusted influencers and community leaders are effective ways to spread accurate information, reduce stigma around health issues, and humanize healthcare, as audiences online often find relatable voices more authentic and persuasive. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that partnering with TikTok mental health influencers and providing them with training or digital toolkits related to posting about health significantly increased the presence of evidence-based messaging in their videos and generated millions of views for credible content.
Finally, healthcare organizations can advocate and collaborate with social media companies to increase platform accountability through measures like verifications for healthcare experts, the removal of harmful misinformation, and enhancement of content policies. These strategies collectively strengthen the reliability and impact of healthcare social media accounts in combating misinformation.
Being a Voice Online
The internet can be the wild west of healthcare information, but that does not mean healthcare organizations cannot make a positive contribution. The more organizations utilize social media to recognize patient concerns, the better prepared they are to address or combat this content.