Discussion
The aim of this study was to evaluate social media (Snapchat) health-promoting interventions on knowledge about oral health during pregnancy among pregnant women in Saudi Arabia. The findings revealed that participants in both the study and control groups had significant improvements in their knowledge immediately after the intervention, and their retention of the information after 1 month was significantly better than their baseline knowledge. There was no significant difference between the SG and CG in knowledge improvement. The scores for the experience items regarding the intervention were higher than the midpoint for all items in both groups, but there was no significant difference between the SG and the CG on any item.The results of previous interventional studies were similar to our study [In the study design we planned to use WhatsApp to provide the same information among participants in the CG as an active comparison. This is because using WhatsApp in Saudi Arabia is observed to be very popular way to share information personally and even in work. Even health promotional materials are shared as text, flayer or infographic using WhatsApp, as form of digitalization of printed flyers used in the past years. In fact, printed flayers were one of the standard methods to increase the knowledge about health issue in Saudi Arabia. However, we did not consider using WhatsApp as another social media intervention. The main aim of our study was not to compare video contents to written contents, nor comparing the techniqual characteristics of Snapchat. However, the aim was to assess the experience of receiving the health information via Snapchat. This is because Snapchat have unique characteristics and unique interaction with audience [It should be noted that researchers in Germany have found differences in how social media applications affect our health [Because our results did not find a significant difference between the Snapchat and WhatsApp social media platforms, it can be supposed that there is not much difference in the effectiveness of one platform over another. However, it could be argued that the results of the CG are inflated. This is because the participants in the CG received the study’s flyer (one page) that contained all the intervention information that was stored on their devices. Thus, participants in the CG could refer back to the information to answer the questionnaire at T2 and T3 much easier than participants in the SG, where the information was found in the middle of Snapchat videos. In fact, a recent study found that WhatsApp was a good method of disseminating information in Pakistan about COVID-19 [Based on the findings of this study and prior studies in the literature [Additionally, we want to highlight that our intervention was simple and that the content used can be replaced by other content to enhance oral health education. Nevertheless, further research is recommended to validate this argument as it is not clear whether using social media as a venue to improve oral health is more effective than standard methods of disseminating information, such as lectures.As the aim of this study was not to assess the prevalence of knowledge of pregnant women toward oral health knowledge, we did not include a thorough analysis about the questionnaire items and their results, which is available by the corresponding author upon request. The low sample size of the participants might give a false implication on emphasizing item by item discussion. Thus, we only included our discussion to the main aim of the study.The strengths of this study include the study design, a single-blinded RCT, which is considered one of the most reliable study designs [