Assessing Health Information Seeking Behaviors Among Targeted Social Media Users Using an Infotainment Video About a Cancer Clinical Trial: Population-Based Descriptive Study.

Abstract

Background: The lack of information and awareness about clinical trials, as well as misconceptions about them, are major barriers to cancer clinical trial participation. Digital and social media are dominant sources of health information and offer optimal opportunities to improve public medical awareness and education by providing accurate and trustworthy health information from reliable sources. Infotainment, material intended to both entertain and inform, is an effective strategy for engaging and educating audiences that can be easily disseminated using social media and may be a novel way to improve awareness of and recruitment in clinical trials.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether an infotainment video promoting a clinical trial, disseminated using social media, could drive health information seeking behaviors.

Methods: As part of a video series, we created an infotainment video focused on the promotion of a specific cancer clinical trial. We instituted a dissemination and marketing process on Facebook to measure video engagement and health information seeking behaviors among targeted audiences who expressed interest in breast cancer research and organizations. To evaluate video engagement, we measured reach, retention, outbound clicks, and outbound click-through rate. Frequencies and descriptive statistics were used to summarize each measure.

Results: The video substantially increased health information seeking behavior by increasing viewership from 1 visitor one month prior to launch to 414 outbound clicks from the video to the clinical trial web page during the 21-day social media campaign period.

Conclusions: Our study shows that digital and social media tools can be tailored for specific target audiences, are scalable, and can be disseminated at low cost, making it an accessible educational, recruitment, and retention strategy focused on improving the awareness of clinical trials.