Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Utilizing social media for health promotion has great potential with the ability to reach a large number of persons in a relatively short amount of time. This approach has been underexplored for cancer screening efforts. The goal of this project is to establish the role of social media in improving cancer screening participation. We will develop messaging promoting cancer screening by gathering data from focus groups with individuals 50-74 years of age who are eligible for colorectal cancer screening. We will then test these messages on Facebook through a 3-month long ad campaign. We will track various outcomes to evaluate the messages including how effective they are in increasing participants' intention to get screened and actual screening uptake. Our study results are likely to be taken up by screening programs looking for innovative ways to increase screening participation and can easily be adopted to other disease sites including cervical and breast cancer screening.