Integrating Social Media Into the 2009 H1N1 Flu Communications Strategy

Background: 

The use of social media to disseminate health messages has grown significantly in the last five years and continues to trend upward. There are three key attributes of social media channels that are believed to make them highly effective as health communication tools: personalization – content tailored to individual needs; presentation – timely and relevant content accessible in multiple formats and contexts; and participation – partners and the public contribute content in meaningful ways.  Additionally, many of these technologies facilitate social engagement, viral sharing of information, and trust. 

Program background: 

Social media has been used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in health communications campaigns for several years, but the 2009 H1N1 flu response was the first official emergency activation and pandemic flu response to use social media in the overall communications efforts.

Evaluation Methods and Results: 

CDC assessed the effectiveness of each social media activity by reviewing metrics from CDC.gov and several analytics programs.  These metrics demonstrated significant improvements in reach of 2009 H1N1 flu information and resources, including

• almost 50 million views of flu-related RSS feeds,
• nearly five million views of flu-related widgets,
• over three million views of flu-related content on YouTube, and
• more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter with almost 500,000 click-throughs to flu-related content on CDC.gov.

CDC.gov users who use social media on the site also reported greater satisfaction with CDC.gov and indicated that they were more likely to return to the site, recommend it to others, and find CDC.gov content more trustworthy than CDC.gov visitors who do not use CDC social media tools. In addition, anecdotal reports of increased awareness and positive health impact were reported through digital outlets. Several channels were also evaluated for activity, satisfaction, message effectiveness, and likelihood for behavior change.  For example, the satisfaction of CDC's Twitter activities was high, with 95% of survey respondents stating they were satisfied or very satisfied with the three, main CDC Twitter profiles used in the 2009 H1N1 response.  Likewise, the text messaging pilot found that 62% of respondents were very likely to use information in the text messages to improve their health, and 60% would recommend the text messages to a friend.

Conclusions: 

The principals of integrated marketing apply to digital health communications efforts, in that creating strong, compelling, science-based call-to-action messages that are relevant, timely, credible, useful and clear can be effective in 160-character text messages, 120-character Twitter messages, or longer blog posts, for instance. Integrating social media into overall communications strategies and plans strengthens our efforts by increasing reach, improving our ability to target audience segments, and facilitating participation and engagement. Likewise, reinforcing messages in multiple formats can further improve message reach and access as well as audience perceptions of credibility and trust with minimal effort and cost. 

Implications for research and/or practice: 

Web 2.0 activities can strengthen and compliment traditional communications and should be considered as part of an integrated communications strategy that can be used to significantly improve the health and safety of millions.