Leveraging social media to increase awareness of prostate cancer genetics: A sponsored ad campaign and online survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Germline genetic variants are important for prostate cancer management and hereditary cancer risk assessment, but testing is underutilized. Social media is increasingly serving as a source of awareness for health information.
Objective:
We created and tested social media messages related to prostate cancer genetics and genetic testing to determine which was most engaging and led to the highest completion of a survey that assessed knowledge and attitudes about prostate cancer genetic testing.
Methods:
Methods:
A paid social media campaign was developed to disseminate targeted messages about prostate cancer and genetics. We tested combinations of 8 images and 8 messages that were created or selected by the research team and reviewed by a study-specific advisory board. We targeted males and females over age 35 living in the United States. The campaign was launched on Facebook for 6 days. We tracked the reach and impressions of each post. The survey, provided directly after someone viewed a post, assessed knowledge about prostate cancer and cancer genetics, as well as beliefs about cancer risk and genetic testing. Descriptive and multivariable analyses were used to analyze survey data.
Results:
Results:
Most posts were viewed by females (84%) and people over age 55 (87%). The two most engaging images were a group of ethnically diverse males (Reach: 28,151 people; Impressions: 33,727 views), followed by a Hispanic family (Reach: 16,026 people; Impressions: 20,113 views). The message with the most engagement was: “Breast cancer and prostate cancer may be related because they can arise from the same gene mutation in a family,” (Reach: 58,980 people; Impressions: 74,834 views). Among 875 survey respondents, 75% strongly or somewhat agreed that genetics play a role in the development of PCA and 84% would want to know if they have a genetic predisposition to PCA.
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
It is feasible to use social media platforms to test and disseminate messages that raise awareness about prostate cancer genetics and the connection with other cancers (e.g., breast cancer), as well as to deploy surveys that reach a wide audience.
Citation
The author of this paper has made a PDF available, but requires the user to login, or create an account.
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.