Facebook HPV vaccine campaign: insights from Brazil

ABSTRACT

The vaccination coverage rate has fallen in recent years in Brazil. Although Brazil is a country influenced by social networking and analysis of social media generated content has emerged as an important area of research, this is the first study to investigate how the HPV vaccine is portrayed on the Facebook page of the Ministry of Health and to interpret the user-generated content. Our work evaluated the posts published by the Ministry of Health as well as posted comments, shares and reactions of the population related to the HPV vaccination campaign on the specific Facebook page between January and July 2018.The data were analyzed in three stages: (i) overview of published posts; (ii) analysis of posted comments; and (iii) sub-group analysis of posted comments. This study makes important contributions from the point of view of using social media as a public health communication tool.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavior
• HPV vaccine
• social media
• Facebook
• health communication
• Brazilian Ministry of Health

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our editor and anonymous reviewer for the tips contributions and recommendations. All comments were very helpful, and we believe that by addressing the comments and suggestions, our revised manuscript was significantly improved.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Authors’contributions

All of the authors contributed to the planning, writing and revision of the manuscript. All the authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethical approval

Not required given the nature of the article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at here.

Notes

1 https://apps.facebook.com/netvizz/.