Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jun 7, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 4, 2021 - Jul 30, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 18, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Use of Live Community Events on Facebook to Share Health and Clinical Research Information with a Minnesota Statewide Community: An Exploratory Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Community-engagement can make a substantial difference in health outcomes, and strengthen the capacity to deal with disruptive public health events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms such as Facebook is a promising avenue to reach the broader public and enhance access to clinical and translational science and requires further evaluations from the scientific community
Objective:
To describe the use of live community events to enhance communication about clinical and health research through a Facebook platform case study (MN Research Link) with a Minnesota statewide community. We examined variables associated with video engagement including video length and type of posting.
Methods:
From June 2019 to February 2021, MN Research Link streamed 38 live community events on its public Facebook page, MN Research Link. Live community events highlighted different investigators’ clinical and health research in the areas of mental health, health and wellness, chronic diseases, and immunology/infectious diseases. Facebook analytics were used to determine the number of views, total minutes viewed, engagement metrics, and audience retention. An engagement rate was calculated by the total number of interactions (likes, shares, and comments) divided by total length of the live event, by the type of live community event.
Results:
The 38 live community events averaged 23 minutes and 01 seconds in duration. Total minutes viewed for all 38 videos was 10 hours 44 minutes and 40 seconds. Viewers watch time averaged 23 seconds of content per video. After adjusting for video length, promotional videos and research presentations had the highest engagement and retention rates. Events that included audience participation did not have higher retention rates compared to events without audience participation.
Conclusions:
The use of live community events showed adequate levels of engagement from participants. A view time of 23 seconds, on average per video, suggests that short, informational videos engage viewers for CTS content. Live community events on Facebook can be an effective method of advancing health promotion and CTS content, however certain types of events have more impact on engagement than others.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.