• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 8, 2017

While mocking social media is sort of a pastime of mine (I mean, it’s such an easy target) even I will admit it also has some very positive aspects.

One of the more surprising benefits is its ability to boost participation in fitness regimens by allowing users to compare their activity with other participants, taking advantage of humanity’s innate competitive drive.

That’s the upshot of a new study, funded in part by the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub initiative, which analyzed data from the Argus fitness app documenting the exercise habits of more than six million Argus users, including activity level and heart rate information, for a total of 791 million discrete activities.

The Argus app enables users to join a social network and share their exercise data with other users, or simply use the app alone if they wish.

Comparing exercise data from these two groups, the researchers found that users who joined the social network increased their daily physical activity by an average of around 7%, or 400 steps, per day compared to users who didn’t join the social network.

By analyzing the timing of exercise data and its distribution across social networks, the study was able to prove that joining the social network actually made people more likely to exercise.

As opposed to alternative explanations based on correlation, for example, that people who are already more likely to exercise are also more likely to compete with others.

Along the way they discovered some interesting trends within the social networking effect.

For example, female Argus users increased the daily exercise regimens by an average of 52% more when paired with another female user than with a male user.

These are just the latest results suggesting social media can help improve fitness.

For example, for a study published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports last year, researchers divided a total of 790 subjects (all college students) into six-person teams, with incentives offered based on the number of fitness classes attended.

Some teams were able to view online comparisons of their own performance with other teams via a custom-built social media program, while other teams were not.

Further, some teams were able to use inter-team social media support mechanisms, including chat, while others were not.

Overall, the researchers found that teams who were allowed to view performance comparisons on social media showed class attendance 90% higher than teams that didn’t view them, with an average attendance ranging from 35.7 to 38.5 classes per week for the former and 16.8 to 20.3 for the latter.

The highest participation was seen among teams that could both view other teams’ performance and communicate with each other online.