Advantages and Risks of Using Social Media on Public Health Communication

Public Health Communication and Social Media
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Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are used by organizations all over the world to market themselves interact with their customers and for many other reasons. An example of these organizations is the public health organizations which use social media platforms to market their brands and also to communicate important information about what they do. This paper will analyze the World Health Organization (WHO), which directs and regulate health activities within the United Nations and their use of Twitter as a social media platform to pass information regarding the organization (Fayyad et al.2017).
There are several advantages that the public health organizations obtain by using Twitter or Facebook for communicating public health information. The platforms allow the organizations to provide all the information regarding their healthcare services which help their followers to obtain knowledge and understanding on several healthcare topics — the organization tweets about everything about itself including the activities they are carrying out. The platforms also allow the organization to communicate with their clients who are the followers. There is a section for reply or retweet on twitter. Therefore the followers can post their comments, and the organization reacts to them.
Twitter and Facebook accounts allow organizations to market their products and services all over the world. In the case of public health organizations, they use their twitter account to advocate for better health for everyone, everywhere. Their hashtag is always Health for All. The other advantage of using social media by a public health organization is public education where the organization posts various health issues and people can be able to read them and understand. The organization also uses Twitter to communicate its events and activities and encourage people to attend. They are also able to convince people to attend by listing the advantages of their attendance. This is done through the twitter account and other social media platforms.
These social media platforms also have disadvantages both to the organization and to the followers. 75% of the information on social media such as Twitter is believed to be unreliable and of poor quality. This is a challenge for the organization because their information is not 100% believed to be original and reliable. The health information may be unreferenced, informal and incomplete hence reduces the client's trust. Another challenge the followers face is ignorance by the organization (Fayyad et al.2017). A client sometimes posts concern and tags the organization who fails to respond to the concern or do so at a later date which ends up discouraging the client.
The other disadvantage that the organization faces is a limited audience. Not everybody is on social media; not everybody is on Twitter. Therefore, their information will always reach a given percentage that may not even pay attention to it. There is no guarantee that someone will pay attention to information on Twitter. Only a small percentage will do so. The existence of fake accounts is also a challenge to the organization; fraudsters may pretend to be the ...