A school-wide assessment of social media usage by students in a US dental school

Social media sites have become an established means of communication due to the exponential growth in number of users across the world and the encouragement of interaction between users through site features. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which Loma Linda University School of Dentistry students use social media accounts, the types of accounts they prefer, their interest in incorporating social media into courses and their perceptions of the usefulness of social media in private practice. In addition, we wanted to determine the degree of student interest in the integration of these social tools into their instruction. One thousand one hundred and sixty-two students from Loma Linda University School of Dentistry were invited by e-mail to complete a confidential 18 item multiple choice survey through Surveymonkey.com. The overall response rate was 30% (n = 351) from the pooled response periods; the first in 2011 and the second in 2013. Similar to other studies, Facebook was used by 91% of the School of Dentistry students, and less than half used Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. Of the respondents, 68% of students reported communicating on social media daily and 80% saw value for practising dentists to operate accounts. Time and privacy concerns were the largest barriers to usage at 16% and 12% respectively. One third of respondents were in favour of the incorporation of social media in their courses.