People who go online to check Facebook or Twitter are also more likely to go online to find information about a disease or to find a medical provider, according to a study in the Journal of Health Communication.
Researchers used data on 2,928 adults from three Pew Internet & American Life Project surveys conducted between 2006 and 2010 and compared reported social media usage with the use of Internet resources to find health information.
Study results showed active social media users to be the most likely to go online for health information, especially social media users with chronic conditions. And this correlation has grown stronger over time: “With the growth of social networking, the relationship between their use and people’s likelihood to seek health information online was more obvious in 2010 than in 2008 and 2006,” the researchers wrote.
More articles on social media:
10 statistics on nurses' use of social media
Physician recruitment: Which social media sites are best?
Two-thirds of NPs use mobile devices at work