Purpose: To determine how social media platform and cancer content is associated with the presence of social support in responses to young adult cancer caregivers' (YACC) posts.
Design: We retrospectively collected YACC's Facebook and/or Instagram posts and all responses from the first six months of caregiving.
Sample: Eligible YACC were 18-39, caring for a cancer patient diagnosed 6 months-5 years prior, spoke English, and used social media weekly.
Methods: Social media posts and responses were manually coded for five social support types, then transformed to depict the proportion of responses per post representing each type of support. Using mixed-effects models, we compared the distributions of responses with social support types by platform (Facebook vs. Instagram) and cancer content (no vs. yes).
Findings: More responses contained emotional support on Instagram than Facebook (B = 0.25, Standard Error (SE)=0.09, p = 0.007). More responses with cancer content contained -validation support (B = 0.20, SE = 0.07, p = 0.002), but fewer contained emotional (B=-0.17, SE = 0.07, p = 0.02) and instrumental support (B=-0.06, SE = 0.02, p = 0.001) than posts without cancer content.
Conclusions: Studying the responsiveness of social media followers by platform and cancer content provides a foundation for intervention development.
Implications for psychosocial providers: Emphasizing the suitability of different social media platforms for particular support seeking behaviors is essential.
Keywords: cancer information; caregiver; social media; social support.