Health Promotion Using YouTube: The Experiences and Preliminary Findings from the Indonesian INAHEALTH Channel

BACKGROUND: The YouTube channel is a promising platform to deliver health promotions because it can reach a large population. However, few studies report experiences delivering health promotion on the YouTube channel especially in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries. In 2017, we established a digital health promotion program named INAHEALTH YouTube channel. AIM: We aim to report the experiences and lessons learned on how to develop a health promotion program using the YouTube platform. METHODS: The steps of developing a health promotion program using a YouTube channel started from assessment, designing working system, piloting the system, implementing, evaluating, and revising the system regularly. The performance of the INAHEALTH YouTube channel and its videos needs regular monitoring not only by considering the appropriateness of health message to the target audience but also how to engage the audience. RESULTS: There are 16 playlists with 399 videos, about 100K subscribers per June 30, 2021. The characters of viewers are 18–34 year (55.3%), more men (54.8%) and comes from Indonesia (93.4%). The word cloud analysis, found that audience were concerned about their/their family sickness and looking for information. The traffic sources of INAHEALTH channel were dominated by suggested video (46.7%). However, the engagement of the videos was still low. Some recommendations to develop a health promotion channel on YouTube: Understanding the audience, delivering video content suitable to the audience, encouraging enjoyable interactions, and managing the online experience. CONCLUSIONS: Health organizations can use these experiences of developing and improving the performance of YouTube channel promotions in delivering health information.