Impact of social media on patient's decision-making toward orthodontic treatment

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the usage and social media habits of orthodontic patients. Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional design was employed to carry out this study. The questionnaire that was used contained the following sections: Demographic data, questions relating to social media behaviors and sociodemographic characteristics, and questions relating to orthodontists' utilization of social media. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were examined. The final Arabic version was adopted and the Google Drive template was used. The link was sent to the orthodontic patients via different social media platforms and applications. Results: A total of 139 orthodontic patients agreed to take part in this study, of which 78 were females and 61 were males. The most popular applications for obtaining orthodontic-related information were Snapchat (28.7%) followed by Instagram (23.7%), and WhatsApp (22.3%). Approximately 58.9% of the patients reported that social media has no direct impact on their decision-making involving orthodontic treatment. Treatment modalities were found to be the most searched topic by the orthodontic patients (44.6%) followed by treatment costs (30.2%). Conclusion: Our study revealed that women not only use social media to check their treatment progress more than men, they are also more curious to compare their progress with other people than their male counterparts. In addition, the findings showed that social media has a greater impact on female patients when it comes to making a decision about orthodontic treatment. Treatment modalities and treatment costs are the topics most searched for by orthodontic patients.