Using Social Media to Magnify Engagement of Your Trainings

Background: Have public health trainings lost their mojo? Have practitioners become so dependent on PowerPoint presentations that they are no longer engaging their audiences? Trainings are only effective if your audience is paying attention and learning the material. Social media can be used by public health to increase engagement in both in-person and online trainings. Using social media enables training messages to be shared with a wider group of contacts and gives participants the opportunity to keep talking about what they learned after the training is over, promoting deeper learning of the material. For in-person trainings: -Hashtags can be created for participants to use to tweet during the training and a twitter feed can be shown on a separate screen in the room -Periodic breaks can include a review of question/comments from Twitter For online trainings: -Participants can interact during a simultaneous Twitter chat or Google Hangout where questions can be received through the feed -Participants can send in questions via email, and hosts can monitor the mailbox and respond in real time

Program background: Danya International produces live webcasts for our public health partners to increase knowledge of various public health topics as well as use of social media. Social media is used prominently to promote, engage, and enhance these live streamed events before, during and after the tapings. Cross promotional messages are utilized on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as just a few examples of how digital channels can be used to draw audiences to the training. During the webcasts, viewers are encouraged to tweet using a hashtag created exclusively for the series. Participants shared ideas, best practices, and posed questions which the moderator incorporated into the live events. After the webcast, archived versions of the taping and presentation slides are made available for viewing on multiple social media channels. These postings increased viewership of the webcasts, provided ongoing opportunity for those wanting continuing education credits, and helped increase traffic to our partner’s social media channels. 

Evaluation Methods and Results: Danya International has helped our clients reach close to 10,000 people via e-learning training. Not only did audiences check in, through the power of social media, these same audiences interacted in real time. Participants posted over 3,000 messages and retweets throughout the series displaying learning and engagement in the content. Ninety-five percent of those surveyed reported an increase in knowledge as a result of the training.

Conclusions: The use of popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are already engaging audiences. Public health should take advantage of the power of online connections to teach people in a new way. No longer do trainings have to abide by traditional models.

Implications for research and/or practice: Public health organizations can increase the effectiveness of their training with the use of social media before, during and after a session. The result of this juxtaposition between social networking and learning is an increase in engagement, retention, and exposure to the materials.