My name is Jennifer Rosinski and I’m a Senior Marketing Manager at UMass Medical School’s Commonwealth Medicine division. My team uses social media channels (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) to reach global audiences across all social strata. Connecting with audiences through social media can help build your brand, share your expertise, and foster connections.
Social media is a quick, low-cost, high-impact way to spread the word about your organization’s major achievements and accomplishments. Twitter and LinkedIn, in particular, have become go-to places to share the latest research and knowledge in diverse fields from health care to financial management. In the evaluation world, social media can easily be used not only to disseminate project findings, but to share resources, recruit study participants, mobilize populations for community engagement activities, seek input on the development of tools, and much more.
Hot Tips:
- Post publications you author, including journal articles, technical reports, blogs, and posters. Make sure these are public and the publisher has no restrictions. Our practice transformation expert Joan Johnston shared her poster about optimizing cervical cancer screening.
- Share media coverage in which your organization is mentioned. This helps spread the message to a wider group. Make sure to mention any partners with whom you’ve worked so they can share it, too. The Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services shared our Tweet about news coverage of the Silver Alert Emergency Response Program partnership.
- Like and share items posted on LinkedIn that have relevance to your field, or that highlight your work. Our pharmacists liked a post in our LinkedIn group about their conference posters.
- Talk about awards, appointments or other accolades. Our Clinical Pharmacy Manager Kimberly Lenz shares her excitement in a Tweet about being appointed to a public advisory council.
- Comment on news others share. One of our autism advocates, Elaine Gabovitch, elaborated on a poster that was posted in our LinkedIn group.
- Tweet from conferences you attend or host. Here, Warren Ferguson, founder of the Academic & Health Policy Conference on Correctional Health supported by UMass Medical School, shares that a speaker is addressing mental health in criminal justice.
- Connect with your colleagues (past and present), clients, partners
- Follow groups – employers, alma maters, interest areas
- Keep your profile up-to-date with new accomplishments
- Learn how to appropriately abbreviate – 140 characters can be challenging; typos are easy!
- Use other Twitter handles in your tweets to let others know you are talking about them.
- Include relevant hashtags in your tweets. These searchable keywords increase your post’s visibility.
Rad Resources:
- Twitter: Getting started
- Twitter: How to Use It
- LinkedIn: The Basics
- HubSpot: How to Use LinkedIn
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.