Best Practices and Lessons Learned From a Health Literacy Twitter Chat

Background: Social media have become popular channels for moving from an information dissemination model to interactive, collaborative engagement. The public health world is beginning to capitalize on this new venue for community engagement. Twitter - a microblogging service that enables users to post messages ("tweets") of up to 140 characters - is especially effective in reaching a wide audience, building professional relationships and catalyzing discussion among a network of people with common interests but who may not have otherwise connected with each other.

Program background: The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) runs the @healthfinder Twitter account, which provides actionable health and wellness information to a continually growing number of Twitter followers — upwards of 74,000 by the end of October 2010. On October 7, ODPHP hosted a health literacy Twitter Chat in recognition of Health Literacy Month. The chat featured an influencer panel of stakeholders that represented a variety of perspectives from different disciplines working to improve health literacy. This presentation highlights best practices and lessons learned from hosting a Twitter Chat. The goals of the chat were to engage stakeholders in a dialogue around how to address health literacy, to foster new connections and collaborations towards this end, and to encourage action towards improving health literacy. Strategies that were critical to the success of this chat included having a clearly defined goal for the chat and its desired outcomes, choosing a topic that would resonate with our target audience, and determining roles and providing guidance to chat participants.  It was also essential to engage a panel of key influencers to help drive the conversation.  In addition, we provided follow-up to recap the main takeaways from the discussion and to communicate back to our audience what we had learned together as a community.  This follow-up not only provided an archive and synthesis of the chat, but it also provided a venue to ensure that the conversation continued after the chat’s conclusion.

Evaluation Methods and Results: The Twitter Chat garnered more than 1,400 tweets from more than 350 participants, and the hashtag used was a top trending topic in the Washington, DC area. More than 50 different resources were shared by participants in the chat.  A blog post recapping the chat received 21 comments, and in the month following the chat the @healthfinder account gained more than 4,700 followers. As of March 2010, @healthfinder now has nearly 115,000 followers.

Conclusions: The health literacy Twitter Chat garnered wide reach and productive engagement from a diverse group of interdisciplinary stakeholders.  The chat was a catalyst for professional connections, increased engagement in the @healthfinder Twitter account, and ongoing discussion beyond the close of the chat itself.

Implications for research and/or practice: Twitter Chats can be a valuable and cost-effective channel for connecting a diverse user audience and for encouraging collaboration around a health initiative.  Best practices for hosting effective, engaging Twitter chats include having well-defined goals, choosing the right topic, outlining roles and responsibilities for participants, engaging key influencers and conducting follow-up to foster continued conversation.