Tag Archive for: twitter

Patient Advocacy: How To Increase Twitter Engagement

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While Twitter might not be as popular as other social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, it nevertheless has a large following among healthcare professionals and patient communities. Twitter has the potential to be a powerful tool that keeps you informed, encourages collaboration, amplifies advocacy activity, and raises awareness of your cause.

When Twitter first launched in 2006, gaining traffic from it was easy. Since there wasn’t much competition among users and the concept of tweets was still relatively new, people were curious to click on the links users tweeted.

Today, gaining followers and increasing engagement is harder. But there are ways once you understand how Twitter’s algorithm works. In this article, we’ll cover some tips and techniques you can use to improve your engagement rate and make a bigger impact with your advocacy campaigns on the platform.

How Twitter’s Algorithm Works Today

1.Relevancy

Since 2018, Twitter’s main timeline is no longer chronological. This means an older tweet may appear alongside a tweet from two minutes ago and one from ten minutes ago. Twitter’s algorithm sorts the tweets you see based on your interests, which is why Twitter may sometimes show you a tweet from someone you don’t follow.

What this means for you: Because Twitter shows you content it thinks will be of interest to users, you should check that the people you follow and those who follow you share the same interests.

2. Timeliness

Twitter’s algorithm is heavily weighted by time so timing is one of the most crucial factors that influence how well your Tweet performs and how many people engage with your content.

What this means for you:  You need to post at a time when people are active online for a better chance of visibility. Based on research by social listening platform Sprout Social the best times to post on Twitter are around mid-mornings and mostly on weekdays (Central Time). This will of course vary depending on location. Therefore, it is best to experiment with your timings to discover what works best for you. By tweeting at various times, you can determine when your audience is most active on Twitter and use this information to identify the optimal  times to increase visiblity for your tweets.

3. Credibility

Twitter’s algorithm favors credible accounts. Even if someone doesn’t read a single tweet, they’ll see your bio. They will decide quickly whether or not to follow you when they do.

What this means for you:  In order to make your profile look credible be sure to fill out every detail, such as your profile photo, bio, location, credentials, and so on. Your Twitter profile should be regarded as an important part of your professional advocacy activities. When people encounter your online profile, what will be their first impression of you? What might motivate them to follow you?   Do you need a more professional picture to represent yourself online? Do you have an image for your header? As an example, you could use a picture of yourself holding a sign with a strong message. Maybe you’re working on a campaign or a project right now. In that case, why not include an image that represents this in the header.

How To Increase Your Twitter Engagement

We’ve looked at Twitter’s algorithmic elements, now let’s see how we can take advantage of this information to boost engagement on the platform.

What is Twitter engagement?

Simply put Twitter engagement is when someone engages with the content that you post. It includes:

  • Mentions of your Twitter handle
  • Comments on your Tweets
  • Likes of your tweets
  • Retweets of your tweets
  • Clicks on links you included in your tweets

Furthermore, Twitter followers and activity are positively correlated. A Twitter user who is active will have more followers, increasing the likelihood that they will be engaged.

What is a good engagement rate on Twitter?

Twitter’s average (high) engagement rate is currently 0.33 percent, significantly lower than that of Facebook, which stands at around 1 percent.

Engaging content is something people will see, like and retweet.  Early engagement is especially important. Tweets have a half-life of around 18-24 minutes, meaning that half of the engagement will be received in a little under half an hour. If your tweet doesn’t get much engagement within the first couple of hours, it won’t be shown to more people.

The following pointers will help you get the most out of your tweets, and if you use them consistently, you should see a boost in engagement.

Respond to engagement

The simplest way to get more engagement is to get in the habit of monitoring your notifications tab and responding to each person who @mentions, comments and retweets you. If you’re having trouble getting people to engage with you, be the one to start the discussion. Reciprocity is a big reason why people want to follow and interact with you. To start a conversation, ask a question, reference other accounts in your tweets, repost others’ tweets utilizing the quote tweet tool to add your own thoughts, or create a poll. Polls are a Twitter feature with built-in engagement – and not utilized as much as they could be.

Include a Relevant Hashtag

Hashtags, like Instagram, are an important aspect of Twitter usage. Tweets with hashtags have a 100 percent increase in engagement, according to Twitter’s own findings.

Tip: Visit symplur.com to find relevant hashtags for your disease area. If you can’t find a hashtag related to your topic, you might consider creating your own. For more information on using hashtags strategically read Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Hashtags in Healthcare…But Were Afraid To Ask!

Take Part In Twitter Chats

Joining a Twitter chat is a fantastic way to meet new people and engage in conversation. People will come to know you if you attend a Twitter chat on a regular basis, and you’ll be able to swiftly create and grow your own network of supporters. Again, you can find a list of disease-specific chats at Symplur. A great place to start is by joining the Empowered Patient Chat  #PatientChat held every other Friday at 10:00 am Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern.

Add Images To Tweets

You’ve surely heard this before, but it’s worth reiterating: images matter — a lot.  People connect more emotionally with images than text, and in an increasingly crowded digital landscape images can break through the online content clutter. Adding visual appeal to your tweet is a smart way to make your content stand out among a sea of tweets. Not only does adding an image increase the visibility of a tweet, but tweets with images also get more retweets and likes (according to Twitter, a whopping 313% more engagement.)

The type of visual assets you can create include images, videos, infographics, quotes, and GIFs. Take advantage of the fact that you may add up to 4 images to your tweets (all you have to do is click on the photo icon after you’ve added your first image, then add up to 3 more images) and build a carousel of images to draw the reader’s eye.

Tip: Stick to the same colors, typefaces, and layouts in all of your photographs to establish a strong visual identity.

Reshare your best content

Twitter is a fast-paced environment where messages are quickly buried. As mentioned already because a tweet’s shelf life is so brief, you’ll need to publish your best content on Twitter several times to boost visibility. To find your top-performing tweets, use Twitter’s built-in analytics tool (analyticstwitter.com). It’s likely that if this content did well once, it’ll do so again.

Tip: Change things up by adding a powerful graphic, highlighting a crucial statistic, or converting a statement into a question. Experiment with publishing at various times and on various days to see how this affects your engagement rate.

Ask people to share your content

A simple “Please Retweet” can increase the likelihood that people will reshare your content. Yes, it sounds simple, but it works!

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you learned something new today.

MPN Patient Shares Survivorship Tips, Recognizing Social Media Toxicity

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MPN Patient Shares Survivorship Tips, Recognizing Social Media Toxicity from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

 Myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN) patient Julia Olff has experienced the positive and negative aspects of online information and social media in her search for support. Watch as she shares her support journey with what she found helpful and what became toxic in her efforts to gain MPN information and emotional support.

See More From the MPN TelemEDucation Resource Center

Related Resource:

Transcript:

Julia Olff:

So, I think social media has many advantages, especially when you have a rarer illness like myelofibrosis. I was diagnosed with myelofibrosis in 2008, and there really was not a lot of good information yet about the illness online, and I had not met anyone who had my myelofibrosis, so I really appreciated being able to go to places like Facebook in their earlier days, with my illness, to find organizations to find other people with the illness, I think learning from other people in terms of their strategies for coping with her illness, tips for dealing with side effects, and other people can answer questions about the physicians and nurses just can’t because they don’t experience it directly, how something feels sort of setting your expectations for a treatment can be really helpful, and I think that’s where social media really shines, is creating community and connecting it to others and learning from peers. The downsides though, I think, are the amount of opinion, unfounded opinion, not sourced opinion that exists that I saw on social media, and then the angry vitriol or kind of disagreement that I found really harmful to my mental health.

I’m always trying to balance how I feel with my mindset, and there are times that that’s easier to do, and times that that’s harder to do, so when I’ve been particularly unwell or just had a hospitalization, I feel like I have…I’m more vulnerable, I have less of a threshold for negativity and angry commentary, and that you can find that on social media, unfortunately, and then, of course, there’s… what I find troubling or not helpful are the opinions of other people who relay people who don’t necessarily have the depth of credible information about a treatment study, what’s right or wrong as it relates to the latest in myelofibrosis treatment, and treatment advances. So it’s helpful to hear about what it was like to have a stem cell transplant from someone with myelofibrosis, but yet I can’t rely on an individual for credible scientific medically sound information. So I think for me, I actually deleted my Facebook account in 2020, but I did keep my Twitter account because there I follow physicians’ epidemiologists, and of course, MPN organizations so that I can know about upcoming webinars or patient events, or new treatments. So that’s been really helpful.  

Patient Advocacy: Ten Tips For Twitter Success

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I love Twitter. It’s one of my favorite places on the Internet, and one of the few sites I visit more than once a day.

I’ve been a Twitter user for over a decade and in that time I’ve found it has been one of the best places on the Internet to advance my advocacy efforts. From crowdsourcing quotes and opinions, to keeping current with medical research, Twitter continues to be my go-to source for information and collaboration.

Learning Twitter is like anything else in life. The more you use it, the more you learn, and the better you get at using it.

But you don’t have to spend years learning how to become a Twitter pro.

Today I am going to share with you some of my best tips to shortcut your journey to Twitter success.

1.Make Your Profile Stand Out

People are highly visual, and the first thing we notice in a Twitter profile is the picture and the bio.  Most profile images are now mainly viewed on mobile devices. This means that the image itself has to be recognizable in smaller dimensions than it appears on a desktop or laptop screen. These smaller images are known as ‘thumbnails’. For your image to work as a thumbnail, your face must predominate in the original image. Think of framing your picture around your head and shoulders.

Below you’ll find the recommended guidelines for a Twitter thumbnail:

  • Square Image 400 x 400 pixels
  • Maximum file size 5 MB
  • Image types include: JPG, GIF or PNG

You also have an opportunity to personalize your Twitter profile by uploading a custom header image (similar to a Facebook cover photo).  This is prime real estate on Twitter so make the most of the opportunity to bring more creativity and authenticity to your account (for example you might use a picture of yourself holding a sign with a hard-hitting message).

Here are the recommended guidelines for header images:

  • 1,500 x 500 pixels
  • Maximum file size of 5 MB
  • Image types include: JPG, GIF or PNG

Insider Tip:  Go to Canva.com to find a template to create your Twitter header image. Canva templates are already sized to the right dimensions.

2. Craft Your Bio

Alongside your profile image, your bio is usually the first thing people see when deciding whether to follow you on Twitter.  However trying to capture your passion and experience to fit Twitter’s 160 character limit for a bio can be a challenge.  You won’t be able to express all you want to say, so think of this as the opportunity to provide a brief snapshot of who you are and what you do.

Here are some things to consider when it comes to crafting your Twitter bio:

  • How will you describe yourself to pique people’s interest to learn more about your work?
  • Which of your accomplishments will you highlight in your bio?
  • Is there a project you are currently working on? Or a campaign you are part of? Can you link to it in your bio?
  • Are there disease-specific or campaign hashtags you can include?

Insider Tip: Content posted on Twitter is indexed by Google so it makes sense to use keywords in your bio and in your tweets. Think about things that people would search for to find you — a good tip is to look at the Twitter accounts of other advocates in your disease area to see which keywords they’re using.

3. Follow The Right People

If you’re new to Twitter begin by following relevant organizations – non-profits, patient groups, hospitals, etc. Twitter will then auto-suggest people who also follow this account for you.

Follow healthcare professionals, researchers and patient advocates who are tweeting about issues related to your illness. The easiest way to find conversations of interest is to click the native search facility at the top of your Twitter screen and enter disease-specific keywords and hashtags.

Insider Tip: It’s a good idea to organize your followers into Lists. You can create your own Lists or subscribe to Lists created by others.  New to Twitter Lists?  Follow my step by step guide to creating Lists at https://bit.ly/2OOEl18

4. Create Twitter Threads

A thread on Twitter is a series of connected Tweets from one person. With a thread, you can provide additional context, an update, or an extended point by connecting multiple tweets together. When used well, threads are a powerful way to illustrate a larger point.

5. Shorten Your URL Links With Bit.ly

A URL shortener is an online tool that converts a regular URL (website address)  into an abbreviated version that is around 10 to 20 characters long. Use a third-party tool like Bit.ly.com to help you do this.

Insider Tip: Bit.ly does more than just shorten links. You can use it to see how your links are performing in real-time, with insights that show you which content or channel is working best for you, including total clicks and top referring social channels.

6. Use Hashtags Wisely

Hashtags tie public conversations from different users into a single stream, allowing you to connect more easily with existing conversations and discover new people who are tweeting about the healthcare topics you are interested in.  Twitter’s own research into hashtags shows that there is significant advantage to using them. Users can see a marked increase in engagement simply by using relevant and popular hashtags in their tweets.

Insider Tip: Don’t over-do hashtags.  When #you use #too #many #hashtags your #tweet looks like #spam.  Aim to have no more than 2-3 hashtags per tweet. Research shows that tweets with more than two hashtags actually see a drop in engagement.

7. Add More Images To Tweets

Adding visual appeal to your tweet is a smart way to make your content stand out among a sea of content.  You can add up to 4 images to your tweets  – all you have to do is click on the photo icon after you have added your first image, then add up to 3 more images.  Take advantage of this and create a carousel of images to draw a reader’s eye.

Insider Tip: Want to add a GIF to your tweet? Twitter has made it very easy to add GIFs by doing all the work for you within the tweet box. All you have to do is choose an appropriate GIF from the drop-down menu or search for a specific genre in the search box. Photo and GIF attachments do not count towards the character limit in a Tweet. Photos can be up to 5MB; animated GIFs can be up to 5MB on mobile, and up to 15MB on the web.

8. Develop a Regular Posting Schedule

On Twitter, the average lifespan of a tweet is 18 minutes. This means that the more you post, the more of an opportunity you have to get seen.

Insider Tip:  Use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your updates to reach more people, more often.

9. Join a Twitter Chat

A Twitter Chat is a public Twitter conversation around one unique hashtag. This hashtag allows you to follow the discussion and participate in it. Twitter chats can be one-off events, but more usually are recurring weekly chats to regularly connect people. The chat will be hosted and the host will ask questions along the way to stimulate discussion and sharing of ideas. Popular Twitter chats include #bcsm; #lcsm; #gyncsm; #patientchat.

Insider Tip: There are chats for most disease topics and a full list can be found by searching the database of the Healthcare Hashtag Project at Symplur.com.

10. Pin Your Best Content

Use the “Pinned Tweet” function to showcase your most valuable content at the top of your Twitter profile. In the past, Twitter typically only allowed viewers to see posts in a sequential timeline which meant that your most important or relevant content quickly got lost in the fast-moving Twitter stream. To solve this issue Twitter now allows you to “pin” a tweet (i.e. keep it placed at the top of your newsfeed) giving you more editorial control on what a viewer will see first when visiting your page.

Insider Tip: Set a reminder to update your pinned content so it doesn’t appear out-dated. Change the content regularly to highlight the most current campaign or project you are involved with.

Wrapping Up

The key to success with any form of social media is to work smarter not harder. These tips will help you increase your follower count, reach a wider audience, and boost your engagement on Twitter. Implement these tactics the next time you post on Twitter and watch your engagement start to climb.

Here’s to your Twitter success!