Twitter Best Practices For Health Communicators

National Conference for Health Communication, Marketing and Media Twitter Best Practices for Non-Profits and Health Communicators August 2009

What is Twitter?

What is Twitter?- Quick facts

Twitter is a microblogging platform composed entirely of 140 character answers to 1 simple question: “What are you doing?” or rather , “What are you interested in right now?”

Twitter receives over 1 million UMVs as of January 2009. Increasing by nearly 1 million from November 2008. Twitter saw a 752% growth from 2008-2009.

Over 3,000,000 Tweets/day ( TechCrunch ), totaling over 1.25 billion Tweets to date. (GigaTweet)

Females now make up over 50% of the Twitter demographic, up from less than 40% in 2008. Twitter's largest age demographic is 18-to-44-year-olds who make up 78% of its users. ( January 2009 iStrategyLabs )

Non-Profits are increasingly growing their presence on Twitter with 43.2 % reporting that they use the service ( Non-Profit Social Networking Survey , April 2009)

The average non-profit organization has a Twitter following of 291, but the most successful organizations can have many more followers. ( Non-Profit Social Networking Survey , April 2009)

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Twitter Enables Real Time, Broad Reach Followers Receive Tweet User sends a Tweet Followers Read, Reply or Re-Tweet Two-way communication

Twitter Vocabulary 101

Tweet- The 140 character message that Twitter users send out to the followers

Followers- people who have chosen to get the updates or tweets from you

Following- the people that you’ve chosen to get updates from

Retweet or RT- A retweet or RT for short is used when someone wants to share information that they found in your twitter stream and find helpful.

@reply- Is simply replying to another Twitter user using their handle name. (ie- if someone wanted to send a message to or about me they’d send it to @sarahmarchetti)

Hashtags or #- a way to tag conversations on Twitter to make them easy to search and follow. The hashtag for this conference is #NCHCMM

The Opportunity for Health Communicators

Join/Start the conversation around your issue.

Educate interested parties

Raise Awareness

Call to Action

Instant Focus Group

Increase Positive Share of Voice for your Organization

9 Harness the power of Twitter for the greater social good

Three Simple Steps for using Twitter

Follow>Create>Engage

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Issue Advocacy: Follow

Follow other non-profits/health advocacy organizations, industry thought leaders and of course people interested in your cause/issue.

Find people interested in your subject area

Follow people who Follow you

Search for mentions

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@RedCross The Red Cross uses Twitter to “to get important info out to affected people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster”. They also tweet preparedness tips and disaster information, health alerts and helpful resources. Updates are made frequently, and remain relevant to the issue at hand. 38

Issue Advocacy: Create

Provide value to your followers by tweeting useful information and links

Consider your unique value

Set a tone

Brainstorm topics

Constantly be on the lookout for news

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@CDCemergency CDC Emergency is creating great content that people find valuable as evidenced by their nearly 600,000 followers. They Tweet information about the Pandemic Flu and other relevant information about public health emergencies.

Issue Advocacy: Engage

Twitter is a conversation tool not a broadcast tool. Participate in the conversation around your issue

Use @replies to participate in the discussion

Respond to people

Create conversations

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@LIVESTRONG LIVESTRONG does and excellent job engaging their supporters, replying to their tweets, retweeting relevant information and providing value to their followers. They promote conversation about cancer on their Twitter handle, causing widespread support in the Twitter community.

#BlameDrewsCancer BlameDrewsCancer is a hashtag that a recently diagnosed cancer patient, Drew Olanoff created to “beat up on cancer”. The hashtag turned into a humorous trend on twitter with everyone blaming Drew’s cancer for their problems. He recently partnered with LIVESTRONG and is trying to find a sponsor to donate a dollar to the organization for every #blamedrewscancer tweet.

Twitter Best Practices

Twitter Do’s

DO create a strategy for engaging in Twitter. Know what you want to achieve before you start

DO create a descriptive bio for your Twitter page so people know what kind of tweets they will see from you if they follow you

DO listen to what people are saying about your issue/organization on Twitter using the Twitter Search function

DO provide value for your followers

DO use Twitter to start a conversation

DO be dedicated to Twitter. Having more than one employee on Twitter will ensure an ongoing presence for your organization.

DO ask questions and get feedback from your followers

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Twitter Don’ts

DON’T just Tweet but also follow others to join in or start a conversation.

DON’T use Twitter to broadcast information. It is a conversation tool.

DON’T be boring!

DON’T panic if someone says something negative about your organization. Thank them for providing feedback and try to address their issue.

DON’T take on all the responsibility for Twitter yourself. Having a colleague or two to help you makes using Twitter easier.

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Additional Resources and Take Aways

Top 10 Twitter Tools

Search.Twitter (f.k.a Summize): Complete an advanced search around key phrases, within specific dates, and from specific handles. (Often broken, Google search is the best back up!)

TweetDeck : A desktop app that lets you organize your followers into specific categories (i.e. industry leaders, customers, potential customers, etc.)

TwitPic : Provides a bridge from your camera phone to Twitter. Pictures can either post to the Twitter public timeline from phone via email or through the site.

Tweet Later : Allows you to auto-follow those who follow your account and provides an auto-welcome feature to send a custom message to new followers via DM or in the public timeline.

TwitterGrader : Measures the relative power and authority of a Twitter user by calculating number of followers, power of network of followers, pace of updates and completeness of a user's profile.

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Top 10 Twitter Tools

TweetBeep : the Google Alerts for Twitter, allows you to monitor conversations that mention you, your brand, related/competitor products, and links to your website/blog. Alerted as keywords appear, reducing the need for a manual search.