Leveraging the Power of Twitter: Executing and Evaluating a Twitter Chat to Ensure Maximum Impact

Background: An experienced leader in digital media, CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention’s (NCHHSTP) National Prevention Information Network (NPIN)  serves prevention partners throughout the United States by providing a platform for engagement and connecting them with program design resources, new research, and prevention strategy information.  NPIN has been utilizing social media since 2008 continually finding new ways to leverage the power of digital media.

Program background: Today, digital media is an essential communication tool for many public health programs.  Limited resources for travel, high-turnover and small staff size mean NPINs core audience of non-profit and health department staff are often called upon to serve in multiple roles making it difficult for them to stay connected.  This also makes it most important for them to make contacts, hear lessons learned, and share innovative techniques. CDC NPIN is helping to address this problem by building online relationships between non-profits, state and local health departments, grantees, federal agencies, and public health employees through social media. By using social networking, microblogs, and real-time online conversations, CDC NPIN’s social media outreach promotes conversations around conferences, awareness days, research, publications, and other major milestones. Through the use of new media, those with the common interest in prevention have their choice of outlets to share their own insights on developments and challenges in prevention.  This session will specifically focus on the success of the bi-monthly #NPINChat on Twitter. Examples of successful collaborations among participants and tangible outcomes of the chats will be shared.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Developing a comprehensive evaluation strategy is key to creating effective digital products.  For NPIN Twitter Chat’s, this strategy includes tracking and analyzing numbers of mentions, re-tweets and click-throughs for web urls shared during the chat.  The designated hash tag is tracked and activity reported to show the potential reach of the chat. Specific sample tweets are also pulled to show more qualitative outcomes such as relationships established between chat participants. A sample metrics report, analysis, and lessons learned including examples of varying participant engagement levels, will be shared as part of the presentation.

Conclusions:  By using readily available social media tools in engaging and creative ways, and by developing comprehensive tracking measures and activity analysis from each event,  CDC’s NPIN has successfully engaged partners and fostered cross-discipline collaboration, networking, and knowledge sharing.  Organizations of all levels and sizes can benefit from others successes and lessons learned and presentation participants will learn implementation tactics, strategies for metrics tracking, and the value of an post-event analysis to better inform their digital media activities.

Implications for research and/or practice: While the use of digital media is becoming increasingly widespread in public health, many community organizations are in need of examples and case studies to ensure that social media tactics are being leveraged for maximum impact.   When implemented and evaluated well, social media tactics such as Twitter chats offer a cost-effective alternative to information sharing and relationship building to further prevention efforts.