• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 12, 2012

A number of studies have shown that social media can help promote healthy lifestyle habits, with potential applications including weight loss, smoking cessation, and now STD prevention. That’s according to a new article published in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which suggests that social media can increase condom use by young adults -- at least for a while.

The article, authored by Sheana S. Bull, Ph.D., M.P.H. and several colleagues from the from the Colorado School of Public Health in Denver, describes a study which involved recruiting a total of 1,758 participants ages 16-25, in large part through existing networks of friends (a core group was recruited and then asked to recruit three friends, who also recruited three friends, and so on). A test group was then exposed to safe sex and STD-prevention messages on Facebook via an online community called Just/Us, including video links, quizzes, blogs and discussion threads; meanwhile the control group was exposed to news and discussion around topics of general interest to young adults.

A follow-up survey conducted two months later determined that the group exposed to safe sex messages was more likely to use condoms, with 68% of the test group reporting using condoms versus 56% for the control group. But the effect tailed off rapidly, with no significant difference between the groups at the six month mark.

Co-author Sheana Bull of the Colorado School of Public Health’s University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus stated: “The use of social media to influence sexual risk behavior in the short term is novel, and is an important first step in considering how to reach the overwhelming numbers of youth online and how to maximize approaches to technology-based interventions. Future work should explore approaches to keep audiences engaged in social media content related to sexual health.”

In a commentary published along with the study, Dr. Nathan Cobb of the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at the American Legacy Foundation in Washington D.C. noted that “such approaches require multidisciplinary teams that include social media specialists, marketers, and software developers as equal partners in design and intervention development. Building such teams will undoubtedly require changes to traditional funding and development models, but the potential is too large to be ignored or minimized.”