O3199: Social Media Ads: A Tool for Pediatricians to Promote Child-Wellbeing and Health

Background: Pediatricians play a crucial role in utilizing social media platforms to educate, engage, and advocate for children's health. These platforms enable pediatricians to provide health education, parental guidance, advocacy, crisis communication during public health emergencies, connect with colleagues and collaborators, share best practices, and stay updated on the latest research and developments in pediatrics, allowing for professional networking. Social media use in Puerto Rico is widespread, with most of the population regularly using at least one platform.

Project Description: From September 2021 to February 2024, the PRAAP Chapter, utilizing skills acquired from social media courses offered by the AAP and supported by multiple grants, developed and published numerous ad campaigns on social media promoting COVID vaccination, safe sleep, lead poisoning prevention, disaster preparedness, mental health awareness, trauma-informed care, and advocacy for Children Advocacy Centers. Ads included culturally sensitive messages with evidence-based content in Spanish, targeting Puerto Rican parents and caretakers aged 18 to 65 years. Inclusive, diverse, and culturally sensitive images were chosen. Posts and videos, limited to 10 to 20 seconds, were created using licensed digital platforms. The impact of ads was measured using various metrics and tools provided by the social platforms, including engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, clicks, reach, and impressions.

Discussion: From September 2021 to February 2024, the PRAAP Chapter published 53 ads on social media promoting actions benefiting the well-being and health of children on Facebook and Instagram. Ads generated 46,022 link clicks, primarily to healthychildren.org. A total of 4,664,620 impressions and a reach of 2,224,986 were measured. Messages in ads reached a larger audience than the 3500 followers on Facebook and 550 on Instagram. The social media campaign to create awareness of the mental health crisis allowed the collection of recommendations from the public and their perception of the problem, which has been used in advocacy conversations with stakeholders.

Conclusion: Social media can effectively target parents and caretakers, amplifying important messages to inform and influence parenting choices. While changes in response to messaging are not directly measurable, responses to social media can be tracked. Tracking social media response metrics and analyzing data provides valuable insights into the impact of messaging, guiding decisions to modify content and strategies. Comments from the public also allow the identification of common misinformation, informing further messaging content.