Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Social networking platforms offer a wide reach for public health interventions allowing communication with broad audiences using tools that are generally free and straightforward to use and may be combined with other components, such as public health policies.
We define interactive social media as activities, practices, or behaviours among communities of people who have gathered online to interactively share information, knowledge, and opinions. We used Google, Web of Science, and relevant web sites to identify additional studies and searched reference lists of included studies. We searched for published and unpublished studies from until June 1, We did not limit results by language.
We included studies in which the intervention website, app, or social media platform described a goal of changing a health behaviour, or included a behaviour change technique. Our main outcomes were health behaviours e. We only reported the RCT results in our 'Summary of findings' table.
We found a range of effects on health behaviours, such as breastfeeding, condom use, diet quality, medication adherence, medical screening and testing, physical activity, tobacco use, and vaccination. For example, these interventions may increase physical activity and medical screening tests but there was little to no effect for other health behaviours, such as improved diet or reduced tobacco use 20, participants in 54 RCTs.
For body function outcomes, interactive social media interventions may result in small but important positive effects, such as a small but important positive effect on weight loss and a small but important reduction in resting heart rate participants in 30 RCTs. We found no difference in effect on psychological outcomes depression and distress representing a difference of 0. We also compared studies assessing interactive social media interventions with those with an active but less interactive social media control 11 studies.
