Are tweetchats an effective way to supplement your media strategy?
by: Heather Gehlert
posted on Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Authoring op-eds, pitching story ideas to reporters, and building relationships with editorial boards are a few tried-and-true tactics that advocates can use to garner media attention for public health and social justice issues — and boost support for policy solutions. These are all highly effective ways to reach a large target audience, but getting news attention takes time and patience, especially in today’s digital world. Amid an always-on news environment, reporters, editors, and producers often receive more pitches than they have time to review.
While it is still possible to cut through the noise and reach your media advocacy goals using traditional techniques, other methods can supplement your strategy. That’s why a new study about tweetchats, published last month in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, peaked our interest. In the study, staff from Salud America! assessed four years’ worth of data from weekly #SaludTues tweetchats, which they have been hosting to make health inequities among Latinx populations more visible and to move people to act.
In theory, these tweetchats — like other forms of media advocacy — allow advocates from Salud America! and partner organizations to reach their target audiences without having to go through a publisher or other gatekeeper first. This is particularly important when considering health, racial, and gender equity, as mainstream media outlets are still overwhelmingly dominated by white, male voices, both in terms of staffing and sources quoted in news stories. Bypassing traditional channels, then, may improve efforts aimed at elevating voices that, too often, are overlooked.
But what does this mean in practice? Were the tweetchats effective in helping the team at Salud America! reach their goals? And what about return on investment? Tweechats take considerable preparation — did the results make the time spent on this strategy worth it? We caught up with study co-author Cliff Despres, who is the communications manager for Salud America! and directs communication for the Institute for Health Promotion Research, to learn more about the study and to glean lessons that other advocates can incorporate into their own social media planning. Our Q&A is below, edited lightly for clarity.
BMSG: The mission listed on Salud America!‘s website is to “inspire people to drive community change for the health of Latinos and all families.” For those who are less familiar, can you break that down a bit? What are some specific examples of community and policy change that your organization helps drive?
SA: We use digital content curation to inspire action on a variety of health-related topics, from education to transportation. What that means is that our team of curators creates a variety of Latino-focused digital content daily. This might be website blog posts about emerging policy and system changes, Salud Hero stories and videos featuring change-makers, and “action packs” with templates in communication, social media outreach, and free technical assistance for advocates.
We curate in three main topic areas: Healthy Families & Schools (health care and clinical trial access, mental health, childhood trauma, etc.), Healthy Neighborhoods & Communities (affordable housing, transportation infrastructure, access to places to play and healthy food), and Healthy & Cohesive Cultures (recognizing and reducing discrimination and bias and prejudice toward poor, minority, and immigrant communities).
Reflecting some of our diversity of topics, we have action packs that help people identify and examine their own implicit bias, urge their city to declare racism as a public health crisis and commit to action, start school food pantries, and begin programs that unite schools and police to support students who endure trauma outside of the classroom. For example, our Trauma-Sensitive School Action Pack has been used by over 500 school leaders to create a system to better support traumatized students. In an internal survey of action pack users, over 30% of respondents reported the pack helped them make school system or policy changes.
BMSG: Why tweetchats? When your team was discussing ways to support its mission, why did you decide on this particular platform and format?
SA: We aim to get our digital content curation into the view of Latino advocates and decision-makers. We use many dissemination avenues to share our curated content online via our website, social media, email, and news media, all with the goal of reaching Latinos and those who advocate for Latinos where they are.
Research has shown that Latinos are heavy users of social media. With tweetchats, we can create a back-and-forth conversation, not only with our own followers about Latino health equity issues and actionable solutions, but with our partners’ collective audiences, too. We can amplify our content and messages over this platform, which had the benefits of easy access and no cost (beyond the person-power needed to make the chats happen).
BMSG: How successful have the chats been in helping Salud America! reach its goals?
SA: From 2014 to 2018, #SaludTues tweetchats attracted 24,609 participants, according to the JMIR study.
Participants made 177,466 tweets. This produced over 1.87 billion impressions. That works out to an average of nearly 1,000 tweets and 10 million impressions for each chat each week (including promotional tweets leading up to the chat and the one-hour chat itself).
These “exposure” metrics show that our #SaludTues tweetchats have a reputation for bringing Twitter users together on a regular basis to discuss many important Latino health equity issues and share actionable solutions.
Data collected also showed that website traffic from Twitter to the Salud America! website was 7% higher on Tuesdays (the day of #SaludTues) than on any other day of the week. This means tweetchats are a critical tool we have to drive visitors to the health equity content and tools we have on our website. And that’s exactly what we want — people accessing our content to make change in their community.
BMSG: Did anything about the study results surprise you?
SA: While perhaps not surprising, one thing we enjoyed seeing in the results was the diversity of #SaludTues participants.
While most participants were from advocacy (16.5%) or health care groups (16.2%), we also had many individuals (11.7%) or organizations (8.9%) who were not from the health industry. These are the kinds of participants who might not have been aware of Latino health issues, but learned something during the chat and were urged to turn that learning into action, as we always share action opportunities throughout tweetchats.
BMSG: We have joined some #SaludTues chats, both as participants and as cohosts. They seem to run like clockwork now, but they no doubt require a lot of behind-the-scenes planning. What key ingredients make for a successful chat?
SA: Our #SaludTues tweetchats are a weekly mix of several key ingredients that help the chats flow seamlessly (as much as possible). Our Salud America! communication team selects weekly tweetchat topics that align with Latino health equity issues, lines up at least two cohosts for each chat, and drafts 6-8 questions each week. The first few questions ask participants to consider, define, or share personal experiences with the topic to build relevance and salience. Then, questions explore evidence, scientific research, and anecdotes of how the topic relates to Latino health through a social and environmental lens rather than just an individual lens. Finally, questions focus on policy solutions or advocacy actions to address or improve social and environmental factors. Salud America! prepares responses to the questions with links to digitally curated content from the Salud America! website, such as educational resources, stories of peer models, and specific opportunities to take action, as well as culturally appropriate photos, graphics, and infographics, often derived from our research reviews.
We also prepare template retweets and replies to quickly engage with cohosts and participants. Similar to a real-life discussion, we work to share, echo, and expand on evidence, redirect focus away from individual behavior change to systemic change, and encourage participants to seize opportunities for advocacy. Each tweetchat continues for an hour and ends with sending thank-you tweets and information on how to engage further with the Salud America! network.
Promotion is also crucial. We draft promotional materials each week, including a blog post, sample tweets, and graphics. The week before each tweetchat, we promote the chat on Twitter at least once a day, escalating to several times a day as the tweetchat nears.
BMSG: How do you sustain engagement week after week and year after year?
SA: A key factor to sustainability is relationships and partnerships. Just as we hoped to share our own Latino health equity-focused content and action tools, many other organizations saw this as an opportunity to amplify their messages, too. For each #SaludTues tweetchat, we engage partners and other organizations to serve as cohosts, who share their own information during the chat. Cohosts might be a subject-matter expert or group, an active advocate or advocacy group, or users who can offer a unique perspective.
Because of our focus on Latinos, we have had many repeat cohosts from Latino-focused organizations. Similarly, because of our focus on health, we have had many repeat cohosts from health-focused organizations, too. These relationships often grew to the point that some organizations reached out to us to use the #SaludTues venue on an annual basis or whenever they had a new report or data to share. Also, many individual Twitter users participate each week to share their resources and perspectives. This adds a strong baseline of weekly participation for us, and, for them, exposes their messaging to the wider #SaludTues audience, thereby increasing their own reach and reputation in the process of contributing to a deep discussion on Latino health.
BMSG: What is the biggest challenge your team has encountered since the chats began in 2014, and how did you overcome it?
SA: A big challenge is keeping the #SaludTues tweetchat series engaging on a weekly basis, and making sure our team members are not overly burdened by the frequency of tweetchats. We solved this, at least partially, by establishing a six-person tweetchat rotation, with each person on the rotation handling a tweetchat every six weeks. That way each person has some ownership in the series, while not having to carry too heavy a burden.
BMSG: You may have heard the saying, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” It’s amazing that you all not only quantified your results but made them available for others to learn from. How have the study findings shaped the goals that Salud America! is setting for the coming year and beyond?
SA: We have been doing #SaludTues tweetchats once a week since 2014. That has opened many doors, helped us build many new relationships, and helped us disseminate our content widely to a diverse audience.
Our findings in JMIR encourage us to keep #SaludTues alive and well.
Inspired by the data, we will soon be experimenting with moving from once-a-week #SaludTues tweetchats to once-a-month #SaludTues tweetchats (on the first Tuesday of each month). We believe this will give our team more time to bring fresh voices and new partners into the mix, make each tweetchat more of an event with greater promotion, and foster even deeper conversations about the most important Latino health equity topics.
BMSG: Any other lessons or insights you’d like to share with advocates who may want to replicate or adapt this strategy?
SA: Finding the right cohosts is one of the most important aspects of successful tweetchats, in our experience. It is important to ensure that cohosts are culturally aware and able to discuss health equity issues without victim-blaming, discrimination, stereotypes, or stigmatizing language.
When seeking cohosts, it is also important to look at a potential cohost’s Twitter feed, to determine whether they regularly retweet other users or if their feed is primarily their own content. If you want your cohost to retweet your tweets, you will want someone that already retweets on a regular basis. In addition, it is imperative to determine if they regularly reply to others and if their message is consistent with yours or aligns with your goals and audience, as it can help build partnerships. One might also look at whether the user shares similar views, clarifies facts, or provides a unique perspective. Tweetchat hosts may want an outside perspective to challenge the status quo or may want to steer clear of conflicting messages. And it is best when cohosts are able to share images, graphics, videos, and weblinks as part of their tweets, as these tweets tend to get greater engagement.
Substantial effort goes into daily digital content curation for the Salud America! website, without which tweetchats as a tool to build self-efficacy for advocacy may not be as powerful. Additional research is warranted to demonstrate the impact of tweetchats on particular audiences, networks, website traffic, locations, sentiment, and topics within Latino health equity, which could augment the true value of using tweetchats to disseminate important health messages and advocacy actions.
To learn more about #SaludTues tweetchats or to express interest in co-hosting one, visit https://salud-america.org/tweetchats/ or email Cliff Despres at despres@uthscsa.edu. Read the full study here: https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/3/e21266.