The current study examined sociodemographic and health-related predictors of the use of three forms of social media in an effort to better understand who is accessing and being reached through these emerging communication channels. The results showed that these three forms of social media have distinctly different use patterns and user characteristics, hence different health communication implications. Among the three forms of social media considered in this study, social networking sites by far attract the most users, making them an obvious target for maximizing the reach and impact of health communication and eHealth interventions. Furthermore, with increasing prevalence of personal wireless devices, communication scientists unanimously anticipate the popularity of social networking applications to continue to grow worldwide [2,25-27]. Compared to social networking sites, a much smaller percentage of Internet users reported writing in a blog, suggesting a lower prevalence of blogging. However, reading and commenting on a blog may have been a more reliable measure of blogosphere penetration due to its lower intensity than actively keeping a blog. Moreover, the blogosphere presents a tremendous opportunity for health communication. Particularly so, because bloggers have been observed to act as important communication stakeholders—not only are they information disseminators, but they play a crucial role in directing Internet traffic through opinions and hyperlinks [28].
Online support group participation was the only survey item included in the present study that was assessed throughout the three iterations of HINTS, and the weighted prevalence estimates suggest a minor increase: in 2003 and 2005, 3.9% of Internet users had participated in online support groups compared to 4.6% in 2007. User characteristics of support groups differed from blogging and social networking site participation, suggesting that online support group participation is driven by health status. This disease-focused medium may be gradually replaced by more interactive, patient-directed social networking sites and blogs, such as CaringBridge and Patientslikeme. These forms of social media have the potential to serve the social support and empowerment functions previously identified for online support groups [29].
Apart from the patterns described above, the results of the study underscore the extent to which age determines who among US adult Internet users are engaging with social media. In this nationally representative sample, age emerged as the single strongest predictor of both social networking and blogging. In light of these findings, it seems reasonable to conclude that health communication efforts utilizing social media will have the broadest reach and impact when the target population is the younger generation. The relatively low penetration in the older population of 55 and older suggests that it is not yet an opportune time to utilize social media in communication with this age group. While this is true currently, we predict a continuing increase in utilization across all generations and groups in the next few years, and it remains a key health communication priority to continue tracking the sociodemographic trends of social media use to be sure that health communicators leverage these dissemination channels most effectively. Finally, for cancer communication efforts, this study found a high prevalence of Internet and social media use among individuals with family members who have/had cancer (see Table 1 and Table 2), suggesting the potential effectiveness of social media cancer communication efforts targeting “secondary audiences,” that is, caregivers, family, and friends of cancer patients.
A key finding of this study offers new and important implications for health communication in this digital age: among Internet users, social media are found to penetrate the population regardless of education, race/ethnicity, or health care access. In particular, the multivariate analyses showed that having access to a regular health care provider did not predict social media use, suggesting that its significance in the bivariate analyses was primarily due to the effect of age. Specifically, younger individuals are less likely to have a regular health care provider. Considering implications of health communication efforts, the results of this study suggest that in the future, social media promise to be a way to reach the target population regardless of socioeconomic and health-related characteristics. If we can enable broader and more equitable Internet access (eg, increasing broadband access or wireless mobile access), thus reducing the digital divide, the potential for impacting the health and health behavior of the general US population through social media is tremendous. Furthermore, the results showed social networking sites are being utilized by African Americans at a higher rate than by non-Hispanic whites. Given the continuing incr