More Isn't Better. Better Is Better. but, How Do You Know How Effective Your Social Media Program Is?

Background:  CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) invested two years in strengthening its social media presence, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.  NCBDDD adopted a centralized approach and worked with Divisions to identify spokespeople to focus the efforts and build an expanding base of followers.  How do the channels and messages work to achieve the calls to action? NCBDDD worked with Porter Novelli to develop a tracking, monitoring and assessment tool.  

Program background:  The team wanted to go beyond counts of hits and follows and get information to build a more effective program.  The team created a series of dashboards which included assessments of the type of content that drives the most engagement on each platform.  The analysis includes  all digital properties, social media as an entire program, and not a collection of siloed properties, allowing the team to understand how the content drives engagement across platforms.  For example, web metrics are included in the analytics so NCBDDD can start to tell the story from each tweet, if the call to action is followed and what information the public and our partners are interested in learning more about. The information gleaned from the analysis provides insight to simple things like the best days of the week to reach active social media reTweeters and YouTube viewers; the issues that draw the most people to the content and drive the most sharing; and how investments in adding more pictures to Flickr drives more views and more engagement from viewers.   

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Working with NCBDDD, the analytics team conducted a five-month pilot to establish a baseline of data to inform the research questions to be answered through the analysis.  The evaluation has included month-over-month comparisons which have identified overarching insights:

• Promoting NCBDDD content through Twitter accounts with larger follower counts (e.g., Dr. Boyle, CDC, Dr. Frieden) can effectively expand reach and increase followers
• Post content or hold online events during the middle of the week when the audiences of the CDC accounts are most actively engaging online.
• Engage the existing audiences on Twitter and Flickr to provide their own advice and tips to expand on the content from the CDC accounts and develop two-way conversations.

Over the past 12 months, NCBDDD has engaged in a quarterly analysis, which has influenced Center branding efforts, spokespersons, social media channels vested in and guidance on drafting messages that are most likely to promote engagement and action.  .

Conclusions:  The dashboards are instrumental in telling the story of the impact the social media program is making within NCBDDD.  This evaluation has enhanced support of the Center’s social media program from across the Center with new adopters and content contributors utilizing the channels to expand the reach of their publications, research and programs.  

Implications for research and/or practice:  Social media is often measured by the number of followers or retweets.  Understanding the types of data that are available to the owners of the content on the platforms and how these data can inform programming can be instrumental for planning, evaluation and support for social media programs.