Representation of health conditions on Facebook: Content analysis and evaluation of user engagement

Background: a sizable majority of adult internet users report looking for health information online. social networking sites (sns) like facebook represent a common place to seek information,but very little is known about the representation and use of health content on sns. objective: our goal in this study was to understand the role of sns in health information seeking. more specifically,we aimed to describe how health conditions are represented on facebook pages and how users interact with these different conditions. methods: we used google insights to identify the 20 most searched for health conditions on google and then searched each of the resulting terms on facebook. we compiled a list of the first 50 facebook pages results for each health condition. after filtering results to identify pages relevant to our research,we categorized pages into one of seven categories based on the page's primary purpose. we then measured user engagement by evaluating the number of likes for different conditions and types of pages. results: the search returned 50 pages for 18 of the health conditions,but only 48 pages were found for anemia and 5 pages were found for flu symptoms