A review of social media analytic tools and their applications to evaluate activity and engagement in online sexual health interventions

Unprecedented public engagement with social media has provided viable and culturally relevant platforms for application in sexual health interventions, yet there are concerns that methods for evaluating engagement in these interventions have not kept pace with their implementation. More recently, the rise of social media analytics (SMA) and online marketing has spawned the development of analytic tools that boast promise for such a task. In this paper, we review a sample of the most popular of these tools, paying particular attention to: (1) the social media platforms that can be analyzed; (2) analytic capabilities; and (3) measures of engagement. We follow this with a review of sexual health intervention studies that apply these tools in evaluation efforts. Our findings suggest that these tools have numerous analytic capabilities that would be useful for evaluating interventions more efficiently. However, in nearly all cases, the tools we reviewed alone would not be sufficient to fully grasp engagement dynamics, as they need to be complemented with additional tools for textual analysis and social network analysis. Therefore, we consider this fertile ground for future collaborations between software developers and behavioral health scientists to develop more comprehensive analytic platforms with applications for public health research.