Impact of social media-based health campaigns on knowledge, belief, and self-reported behavior during COVID-19

Digital media has emerged as a vital tool for timely, global dissemination of public health information. From 2020 to 2022, the World Health Organization ran 81 social media health campaigns on COVID-19, the impact of which were assessed using Brand Lift Studies from Meta, Inc. We conducted two meta-analyses, age-stratified and gender-stratified respectively, to assess impact across recall, knowledge, belief, and behavior questions. Overall, we observed improved lift (i.e. higher proportions of individuals giving desired answers in intervention vs. control group) in both models. In the age-stratified model, there was positive and significant lift among recall (3.0%, 95% CI: 2.2–3.8%), knowledge (0.9%, 95% CI: 0.3–1.5) and belief (0.4%, 95% CI: 0.1–0.8) questions; behavior questions showed positive, but insignificant, lift (0.1%, 95% CI: -0.8–1.1). In the gender-stratified model, only recall (2.9%, 95% CI: 2.1–3.6) showed significant lift, but positive lift was seen in knowledge (0.7%, 95% CI: -0.2–1.5), belief (0.1%, 95% CI: -0.1–0.5), and behavior (0.2%, 95% CI: -0.1–0.4) questions. Our results suggest that social media-based health promotion campaigns may be efficient and effective tools for sharing urgent health information with global audiences, with the potential to drive social and behavior change globally during future pandemics.