Evaluating youth engagement on the CHAT social media mental health campaign

Abstract

Background

The use of social media to promote mental health in public health campaigns is increasing, especially among young people. However, few evaluations investigating audience engagement with these campaigns have been conducted.

Objectives

This study aimed to evaluate audience engagement with Community Health Assessment Team’s (CHAT’s) social media campaign (lasting from 1-April-2022 to 30-September-2022) for young people aged 16 to 30 years old on two social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. It also sought to identify factors influencing audience engagement.

Methods

An interrupted time-series design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign on audience engagement. The study was conducted from 1-October-2021 to 31-December-2022 (6-months before campaign, 6-months during campaign and 3-months after campaign). Post-level and page-level data were drawn from Meta Insights. For post-level results, Wilcoxon rank sum test was conducted to compare campaign and post-campaign engagement metrics with pre-campaign. Segmented linear regression analysis was used to assess campaign effect on daily reach while multiple linear regression was used to determine independent predictors of daily reach.

Results

Level of daily reach on Facebook increased significantly by 5-fold from 21.93 to 128.59 (P <.001) immediately following campaign implementation. Across both platforms, there was a decrease in reach per post and shares per post during campaign, followed by an increase in shares per post after campaign, though this was not statistically significant. Paid advertisements were found to be a significant factor predicting increases in daily reach across both platforms (P <.001).

Conclusions

The CHAT social media campaign was associated with an increase in audience engagement among young people, mainly due to a high number of posts and advertisements. The potential of message fatigue and a lag effect highlights directions for future studies.

Keywords:

• Social media
• youth mental health
• youth engagement
• health promotion
• mental health campaign

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).