A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Creating Visual, Engaging Content

Background: The HHS Office on Women’s Health’s (OWH’s) vision is for all U.S. women and girls to achieve the best possible health. One way OWH fulfills that vision is by educating and engaging the audience through its social media channels and delivering customer-centric communications.

Program background:  OWH has built an impressive social media following by implementing a sound digital strategy based on audience needs and wants. It includes:

• Relevant and accurate information, using content from womenshealth.gov, girlshealth.gov, and other federal agencies.
• Audience-appealing tone and content that emphasizes visuals, including infographics and infocards.
• Prompts in each message to inspire engagement, such as retweeting, sharing, commenting, or liking.
• Use of ambassadors. For specific initiatives, OWH engages well-known individuals and gives them tools to spread the word through their communities. For example, singer Erykah Badu created a Facebook album with OWH’s World Breastfeeding Week infographic and infocards.
• Use of emerging social media tools. Through the OWH-led Federal Women’s Health Web Council, other collaborations, and individual team research, OWH identifies which new tools have HHS terms of service agreements and provide cost-effective solutions to improve social media strategies. Recent additions include Thunderclap, which enlists participants to “donate” a Facebook post or tweet at a predetermined time, and Tweetreach, which improves OWH’s social media analytic capabilities.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  OWH uses a feedback loop to inform methods. In other words, using analytic tools, OWH is able to determine impact and success, including what resonates with the audience, so that it can constantly improve strategies. Over 25,000 people look to OWH for information via Facebook and @womenshealth and @girlshealth are the second and third most popular HHS Twitter accounts, with a combined audience of 1.1 million. The most successful pieces of content include visual elements. A post that included an illustration of heart attack symptoms in women was the most popular piece of Facebook content OWH has ever posted, reaching 134,272 individuals. The next most popular post was an infocard supporting Women’s History Month, which provided a short bio and photo of a famous American woman and reached 39,168 individuals. The third most popular post, reaching 30,704 individuals, was an infographic explaining how the Affordable Care Act addresses women’s health needs. These numbers suggest the tone and content choices for Facebook resonate with the target audience.   Over the past 12 months, OWH has reached more than 15 million individuals on Twitter and created more than 2.1 billion impressions. OWH’s first Thunderclap, organized for National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on March 10, 2014, had 247 supporters and reached more than 1.2 million individuals on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Conclusions:  By implementing a social media strategy that provides accurate health information in a way that’s accessible and interesting, OWH has built a robust, customer-centric social media presence.

Implications for research and/or practice: OWH’s social media strategy—specifically how it creates content for the audience, engages the audience, chooses which tools to use, and evaluates success—serves as a model for other health communicators.