JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Sleep deprivation or insomnia is a major public health problem affecting significant population globally. Persons affected with this problem seek treatment and help information from various medium to alleviate their condition. Data shows that social media is a growing platform for receiving of information on various topic areas including health.

Objective:

This study examined the utility and perception of users about sleep aiding post on social media platform.

Methods:

We extracted sleep aiding or related post from the YouTube social media platform. An algorithm was developed to examine the trend of viewing of sleep aiding post from January 2012 to February 2018. We extracted comments from posts and develop emerging themes based on comments from published posts. Descriptive statistics and thematic content analysis were performed.

Results:

The study showed an increasing trend in the use of social media sleep aiding posts among individuals with sleep deprivation and over 39 million related post were published in the past seven years. Among 294 eligible posts for our study, we estimated a total view count of over 1 billion with a like to dislike ratio of 9:1. The median play length was 186 minutes (interquartile range (IQR): 122 to 480 minutes). Results from our content analysis revealed five themes including having insomnia or sleep deprivation, perception on effectiveness of using sleep aiding post and location of users. Overwhelmingly, majority of comments indicate that sleep deprivation is a major problem globally and social media sleep aiding posts remarkably improved their sleep problem such as improvement in sleep hygiene, falling asleep within short time, and prolongation of sleep duration.

Conclusions:

Globally, there is a growing increase in the number of person using social media sleep aiding post to help with their sleeping problem. Social media could be a proactive medium for insomnia related interventions.