Impact of social media on dental treatment choices: A web-based survey

Background: Social media also helps to attract a diverse group of people that we may not have thought would be interested in oral health; working together, we can keep the oral health message alive. Objectives: The objective is to assess the impact of social media on dental treatment choices and to find the best social media platform to promote oral health based on their use. Materials and Methods: The present cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted among the users of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. Online questionnaire link was constructed using the Google survey tool of Gmail. Questionnaire was circulated through snowball methodology, i.e., link was sent to friends or added contact person on the phone and then was forwarded to the next friend circle. The questionnaire was comprised of 14 questions and was sent to 700 participants. For descriptive and inferential statistics, SPSS 21 was used. KMO and Bartlett's test was used for factorial analysis. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Majority of the participants reported Whatsapp to be the most used app, and the frequency of usage is several times a day (81.8%). Significantly more number of the subjects (43.9%) followed dentists on Instagram. However, more number of the participants reported promotion on Facebook as the reason for their dental visit. The majority (62.4%) of the participants would get affected by written experiences and criticism about dental care on social networking sites and almost half of them get affected in choosing a dentist by the activity of their account. A high proportion of the participants (69.7%) claimed that they watch instructional videos uploaded on social media, but majority of them (78.5%) do not have any applications related to dentistry. Conclusion: Whatsapp can be used as an informative tool for self-oral health promotion as it was found to be the most preferred app.