Social media and breastfeeding: an Instagram study

Abstract

Background: Human milk has many proven benefits but breastfeeding rates are far below the desired optimal level. Social media plays an important role in accessing information and advice on health-related issues. There are several studies investigating how the social media has an impact on the community about health-related issues and decisions. We aimed to reveal how much Instagram has touched on breastfeeding and related contents about infant feeding. Material and Method: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study. We surveyed on Turkish Instagram accounts which only share about children health and diseases between June 2018 and January 2019. We searched the hashtags about child health and infant feeding and we enrolled the accounts that have more than 1000 followers. The obtained data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0 for Windows. The significancy level was accepted as p<0.05. Results: We enrolled 75 Turkish Instagram accounts. The mean number of posts was 743.77 (22-11349) and the mean number of posts of human milk and formula/bottle feeding were 9.80 and 2.07 (p=0.006). Human milk-related posts received a mean of 1368.3 likes, while those associated with formula/bottle feeding received 437.3 (p=0.007). Conclusion: As a result, it is seen that posts on human milk and breastfeeding were significantly more than those on formula and bottle feeding in social media. The expanding world of the internet today, led us to think that social media can be used as an important tool to increase breastfeeding rates. This should be obviously taken into consideration in future plans of policy makers.

Keywords

• bottle feeding
• breastfeeding
• formula
• human milk
• social media

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