These slides were presented at Evidence Live 2015 as part of our workshop on Evidence and Social media. Co-presenter Andre Tomlin

1. Social Media Workshop
Blogging and tweeting the Evidence
Douglas Badenoch & André Tomlin
Minervation Ltd

2. Minervation Ltd
• 20 years in evidence-based healthcare
• The go-to company for ‘evidence-based’
websites
• Digital agency with experience in:
– Health information
– User-centred design
– Coproduction
– Blogging and social media

3. Child, Commissioning, Dental, Diabetes, Education,
Lifestyle, Learning Disabilities, Mental Health,
Musculoskeletal, Social Care, Stroke

4. Why use social media?

5. Why use social media?
1. It’s good for you
– Networking and keeping up to date
2. It’s good for your content/evidence
– Search engines love blogs
3. It’s good for your readers
– They can engage with you directly
4. An increasingly important source of general
information for the public
– About half of Facebook users get news from it
– About half of them get health news from it
1. Pew Research 2014

6. Why use social media?
Keeping up to
date
Following
publications,
organisations and
individuals in your
area
Networking
Forming
relationships &
engaging in a
dialogue with these
people
Promoting
evidence
Putting reliable
evidence into the
ring with the ‘click
bait’ and
‘infotainment’

7. Objectives of this session

8. Pre-workshop feedback
• Advice for newbies (lots of these!)
• Using social media to make your life easier
• How to get professional colleagues using Twitter
• Building audience and raising profile through
social media
• Developing a successful strategy
• Using analytics to measure impact
• Using social media to promote reliable evidence-
based messages

9. Activity 1 – Social media
strategy
5 mins: think about:
1. Objectives
2. Tools or tips
• Groups of 5-6, at least one
“advanced user” in each
• Make sure everyone gets
some objectives down and
some ideas
• Then we’ll take feedback
look at relevant examples
and move on.
Beginner Advanced
Keeping up
to date
Networking
Promoting
your
content

10. Managing Social Media
(with a particular focus on Twitter)
https://support.twitter.com/groups/50-welcome-to-twitter#topic_204

11. Deciding your online identity
“Social media is a mirror of
offline life that can afford a
more equitable
perspective”
Your identity could be:
• Yourself
• Your organisation or
website
• A made-up character

12. Be yourself
• Pros:
– More easily findable
– More open, honest and human
• Cons:
– Harder to hide
• Examples:
– Dr Kate Granger @GrangerKate
– Insp Michael Brown @MentalHealthCop
– Alex Langford @PsychiatrySHO

13. Be your organisation
or website
• Pros:
– Strong branding can work well
– Clear link between website & social
media
• Cons:
– Harder to connect personally with people
– May have guidelines to adhere to
• Examples:
– WeNurses @WeNurses
– The King’s Fund @TheKingsFund
– Lancet Psychiatry @TheLancetPsych

14. Be a made up character
• Pros:
– Stand out from the crowd
– Easier to create a new online identity
• Cons:
– People may not take you seriously
– Building trust may be harder
• Examples:
– Ermintrude @Ermintrude2
– The Mental Elf @Mental_Elf
– Neuroskeptic @Neuro_Skeptic

15. Get you profile right
• Profile photo
• Header photo
• Choose theme colour
• Profile text
• Geographical location
• Website link
• Consider mobile

16. Find out what’s going on in your
area

17. Find out what’s going on in your
area
• Connecting with other active tweeters will
improve your reach
• Who’s in charge of social media in your
organisation?

18. Testing Treatments interactive

19. Testing Treatments interactive

20. Getting started!

21. Getting started!
• Follow the right people
• Listen
• Take the plunge!
• Share share share
• Re-tweet things that
interest you
• Use native tools (Twitter
#Discover/hashtags/lists,
Facebook
hashtags/groups)
• If you like it, consider
using Tweetdeck,
Hootsuite etc.
• What high-
activity users
are doing?
• What are people
saying about
your topic?
• What sorts of
conversations
are successful?

22. Plan your activity
• Commit enough time
• Use your smartphone as well as your
computer
• Use all appropriate sites: Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube etc.
• Make use of “old” material in context
• Repeat your activity at different times of day,
e.g.
– Publish blog at 7.30am (auto-post to Twitter)
– Auto-schedule tweets (at 9.00am, 10.30am,
12.30pm, 2.00pm, 5.00pm, 7.30pm, 10.15pm) to
highlight different aspects of the blog

23. Use a template for strategy
http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-templates/

24. It’s about community

25. It’s about community
• Parallels with real social life
– It takes time and commitment
– Be nice
– Be yourself
– Be professional
• Identify shared interests
• Offer help and support
• Use direct messaging for privacy, but don’t be shy
– contact people who you want to connect with

26. Measuring impact

27. Analytics
• Start with the in-built metrics (e.g. Tweet
activity, Facebook insights etc.)
• Beware vanity analytics
• Consider using paid tools if you’re serious
about measuring engagement

30. Beware vanity analytics
• Hits, page views, visits: don’t count these,
count people
• Unique visits: tells you nothing about what
they actually did on your site
• Followers/friends/likes: active/engaged
followers is what you need
• Time on site/number of pages: poor
substitute for actual engagement
• Email subscribers: email opens and clicks
• Downloads: activations or account creations
Croll & Yoskovitz, Lean Analytics, 2013

31. Measuring engagement
Occam’s Razor (a blog) by Avinash Kaushik Best social media
metrics.
Conversatio
n
• Number of
comments or
replies per
post
Amplificatio
n
• Number of
shares
(retweets)
per post
Applause
• Number of
likes
(favourites)
per post

32. Analytics tools
• Google Analytics: your starting point if you have a
website
• True Social Metrics: in-depth tracking of social media
across platforms
• iPerceptions: exit survey
• Altmetrics: monitor SM activity for academic papers
• Many many more!!!
What to look for:
• Works across multiple social networks
• Comparisons with industry standards
• Using segments to compare different types of activity
• Time of day analysis
• Influencer analysis

35. True impact
• Does social media change beliefs, behaviour
or health outcomes?
• Quantitative studies not all that impressive to
date
• Qualitative studies are more encouraging
• Engagement and empowerment are key
outcomes
• Do we know what outcomes to measure?

36. Activity 2: cannabis

37. Activity 2: blogging
Silins, Edmund et al. (2014) Young adult sequelae of adolescent
cannabis use: an integrative analysis. Lancet-Psych 1 (4) 286-
293.

38. The press release

39. Suzi Gage in The Guardian
“The sample size is still not large where outcomes
are very rare. In the case of suicide attempts,
despite a sample size of 2,537 participants, only 78
people in the analysis attempted suicide, and of
them, only two were daily cannabis users. This
means the strength of evidence is low (as can be
seen by the uncertainty around the estimated
risk, which ranges from a doubling of risk for
daily users to a 22-fold increase), and any bias in
the data will have a larger effect when the numbers
are very small.”

40. Media coverage

41. Activity 2: 10 mins
• You are an evidence-based blogger and become
aware of the Lancet-Psych paper
• You see that it’s getting lots of media attention
• But are its results being reported accurately?
Plan a social media strategy for countering
this
1. Which channels will you use?
2. What outcomes do you want to achieve?
3. What tweets would you plan?
4. How will you measure impact?

43. • Douglas Badenoch @DBadenoch
• André Tomlin @Mental_Elf
• Minervation @Minervation
• #EvidenceLive