Analysis of Plastic Surgery Content within Tiktok
One of the most popular social media apps in the past few years is the video creating app TikTok, with 21% of Americans in 2021 stating they use TikTok and users spending an average of 52 minutes a day on the app. Due to its wide-reaching audience, users of the app garner extensive influence on their viewers. This extends to videos related to medicine, with the hashtag #plasticsurgery producing thousands of videos with millions of viewers. There have been a limited number of studies categorizing these videos, therefore our project aims to analyze plastic surgery related content on TikTok.
Methods/Technique:
The top three hashtags related to plastic surgery on social media were identified. #Plasticsurgery, #plasticsurgeon, and #plasticsurgerycheck were queried using TikTok’s internal search engine, and the top videos recommended for each hashtag were analyzed. Videos were categorized by creator role and content category, with the number of likes, comments, and shares for each video recorded as well.
Results/Complications:
A total of 500 videos within Plastic Surgery TikTok were analyzed and categorized. “Personal experience” was the most common category (27%), followed by comedic (21%) and educational videos (17%). Proportion of content category for each hashtag is depicted in Figure 1. Videos focused on patients’ personal experience yielded significantly more likes (p<0.05), comments (p<0.05), and shares (p<0.05) compared to videos with educational content. Videos recommended from searching #plasticsurgery had significantly more likes, comments, and shares (p<0.01) compared to those recommended from #plasticsurgeon and #plasticsurgerycheck. Videos discovered from #plasticsurgeon and #plasticsurgery yielded a significantly higher proportion of educational videos compared to #plasticsurgerycheck (p<0.05). Of the 84 videos focused on educational content, a large portion (30%) were created by a single user, “doctoryoun”.
Conclusion:
With its massive audience, TikTok video creators can engage with and influence the public. Patients who have received plastic surgery can share their stories, detailing whether they had a positive or negative experience. This can sway the public’s opinion and perception of plastic surgery. Our results suggest that viewers interested in plastic surgery content on TikTok engaged more with content related to personal experience with plastic surgery rather than educational content. Further analysis of the results indicate that educational videos are less likely to be found when searching #plasticsurgerycheck within Plastic Surgery TikTok. To engage more viewers with their content, plastic surgeons may benefit by incorporating personal experiences of patients into their primarily educational-content videos, or including more plastic surgery related hashtags to reach a wider audience. This could serve to both engage more viewers and educate the public.
Figure 1: Proportion of Content Category for each Hashtag