Abstract

Visual information is widely used to deliver health information more effectively on social media, but there is lack of research on how effectively visual information delivers health information on social media. This study reports Facebook users’ reading patterns and cognitive tests (recall and recognition tests) results using health-related Facebook posts. For this study, 21 college students participated in online questionnaire, eye tracking experiment, and recall and recognition tests. First, users paid their attention to the area that contains information (i.e., users focused on the main text rather than photos that do not contain information). Second, in the case of Facebook posts containing infographics, users paid their attention on the infographics, but the recall and recognition test results of the posts with infographics were lower than the posts containing photos. Particularly, when the infographics are in a complex collage format, recall and recognition tests result lower scores. Third, regarding the length of the text, the Facebook posts with short text resulted in higher recall and recognition test scores than the posts with medium or long texts. This study suggested to Facebook health information providers and distributors how to design Facebook posts for delivering health information more effectively.