SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC HEALTH l ASSIGNMENT

Running Head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Social Media and Public Health
Student’s Name
University Affiliation
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SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC HEALTH 2
Social Media and Public Health
From the public health to clinical healthcare campaign, the health industry in various
countries is increasingly turning to social media to increase, promote as well as support the
spread of data and information to enhance both community and personal health practices
(Abroms, 2019). Social media is a tool that has offered space to share vital information as well as
allowed the establishment of support structures to tract individual health and create support
networks between patients post diagnosis. Twitter, Buzz, Bing, Google, and Facebook are the
new words yet they are used daily by millions of people worldwide. It should be noted that social
media has become a powerful global tool of communication for health interventions, offering
public access to various health programs, as well as opportunities for individuals to communicate
with healthcare professionals and among themselves.
Unlike conventional media sources, social medial has the potential to reach many people
especially with the development and advancement in information technology. According to
world statistics, there are about 2.72 billion smartphones users in the entire globe translating to
about 35.14% of the global population (Sidana et al., 2018). This data shows that a good
proportion of the world can be connected to the internet. A public health information can reach
this significant number of people in the remote and dangerous areas in which convention media
cannot access.
The most commonly used social platform globally is Facebook (Kite, Foley, Grunseit &
Freeman, 2016), therefore, it remains the best platform for sharing public health information
especially public health promotion. However, I would propose that other social media platforms
like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram should be used to reach a wider population.