Lifting the Digital Curtain: Utilizing Social Media to Promote Health Content and Engage with Asian Populations

As our lives become more intertwined with the digital landscape, an increasing number of individuals are relying on the internet and social media as their main sources of health information. Currently, there is a dearth of knowledge on how the Asian community interacts with digital health information, specifically in the context of social media.
In this thesis, a 10-week social media campaign was implemented with the goal of increasing the percentage of Asian participants in the Stanford Research Registry - platforms utilized include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter through the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education accounts. Participant data was disaggregated by race and ethnicity in order to better understand the diversity among Asian subgroups.
The percentage of Asian participants increased from 14.26% at baseline to 23.83% at the end of the campaign (525 Asian identifying individuals to 1,871). The greatest increase occurred during the General Outreach phase which utilized all channels of outreach available. Frequencies of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese ethnicities were higher in the Multi-Ethnic category compared to their corresponding monoethnic group.
Social media is a powerful tool that can be leveraged for targeted recruitment – in this study we see how it can increase diversity amongst research participants and potentially be used as an effective tool for information dissemination. This work can be expanded in the future by looking into other social media platforms that are more targeted towards Asian populations and by disaggregating the data even further to fully understand the diversity present in the Asian population.