Impact of Emotional Storytelling in Facebook Health Campaigns on Patient Trust

Abstract

The study explores how emotional storytelling functions in Facebook health campaigns to influence patient trust because it shows that storytelling methods increase audience trust and health professionals' ability to establish connections with their viewers. The research demonstrates through literature review that patient stories which evoke emotions to their audience create higher empathy levels and better understanding of information and stronger perception of realness than standard informational material. Facebook functions as an interactive platform that enables users to build trust through its institutional credibility system and peer-to-peer interactions and social endorsement metrics that include likes and shares and comments. The research shows that emotional storytelling leads to higher audience engagement which results in better social support for patients and increased patient happiness and development of trust that lasts over time when messages include culturally relevant content and special audience needs. Trust will be undermined by misinformation and unethical storytelling methods and data privacy risks which need proper solutions to resolve these fundamental trust issues. The study identifies a research gap in understanding the mediating role of emotional engagement and perceived credibility in shaping trust within Facebook-specific health communication environments.