Designing a Facebook Group to Promote Physical Activity Among Adults

Background: Physical inactivity is a major cause of obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes and has become a major public health problem. Physical inactivity is detrimental to one's health, but it has also created a significant healthcare burden. Within the past decade, many health-based interventions have been implemented to encourage physically inactive individuals to adopt a more active lifestyle. These health-based interventions have used social media websites, particularly Facebook, to establish social support between the participants of those interventions. There is currently limited research on this topic. This study aims to add to that literature by exploring strategies to encourage participants of health-based interventions to interact with a Facebook group. Purpose: An exercise and nutrition-based intervention called Athletes for Life (AFL) has been using a Facebook page over the past 2.5 years to establish social support between participants of the program, among other functions. The level of interaction that participants had with the Facebook page has declined over the past year. The objective of this study is to redesign and refine the AFL Facebook page so that it is more appealing and interactive to AFL participants. Methods: Redesigning and refining the AFL Facebook page were achieved through three strategies. The first strategy was to recruit approximately twenty participants to the new AFL Facebook group. The next strategy was to select a participant to become the group champion who would post encouraging content on the Facebook group wall. The final strategy was to maintain the consistency with which participants liked and viewed posts on the group wall. Results: The results of this study showed nine participants joined the group and these participants had a combined total of 62 likes and 110 views on the group wall over an eleven-week period. Participants interacted with the content posted by the Facebook group administrators on a consistent basis, but only one participant posted a recipe to the group wall. Measuring the level of interaction for each individual post was significant because it illustrated that the level of interaction participants had with posts depended on the identity of the posts' author. Conclusions: Future research should test the effectiveness of a Facebook group page for promoting physical activity and implementing the suggestions from study participants to increase Facebook usage.