A New Blog Series

 We all know that social media is a fantastic tool for marketing and communications. People now expect all businesses and services to have social media accounts by default, whether they are a large corporation or a small GP surgery. As more and more health and social care organisations join key platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, social media has become a channel that you simply can't ignore when it comes to getting your message out there. For those that are yet to take the leap, it can (understandably) be quite daunting. Some have had a twitter account for years but are often selling themselves short from the opportunities at their finger tips. Whether you’re an avid tweeter or completely new to social media, this blog series aims to show you just a few simple tips and tricks that can really help your organisation. We'll help you learn how easy it is not only to share and make the most of the fantastic stories you receive through Care Opinion, but, also spread awareness and encourage more of your patients and service users to share their experience too. I’ll be posting a blog a week focusing on different tips, so, watch this space for updates! Our very first blog is below...

Hashtags

Twitter is the home of the hashtag, so if you're tweeting, you could be making use of relevant hashtags too. When you share (tweet) a story from Care Opinion on twitter, you can use a relevant hashtag so that more people will find your tweet e.g. use the hashtag for that specific project or awareness day, or if it is something more general, you could use hashtags such as #patientexperience or #mentalhealthawareness.

Hashtags work by grouping together tweets with the same hashtag, which makes it easier for others to “search” that hashtag to find relevant tweets.

To add a hashtag, all you need to do is enter the hash symbol (#) and then type the word or phrase after it. Different days of the week have different, (regularly trending) themes on twitter that you can use too. Daily tags are great as they can inspire you to share certain stories with particular themes on a given day. It provides a great opportunity to push some of your amazing stories out there,  as well as increase the chances of people seeing your tweet. For example, Thursdays provide the vintage social media trend of “Throwback Thursdays” which is a great opportunity to share an old story, perhaps one that has lead to a change that still has an impact today. Find some “oldies but goldies” and tweet them out with #TBT #Throwbackthursday hashtags. Make sure you keep your hashtags relevant though, we’ve all seen those annoying tweets that hashtag every, single word #for #no #apparent #reason.

Examples

In the screenshot above, you can see that among the UK trending tweets, there are two Tuesday themed hashtags, “#TuesdayThoughts” and “charitytuesday”. As I have taken this screen grab from twitter in the afternoon, they aren’t trending as highly as they usually do in the morning, when “#TuesdayThoughts” is regularly at the top of the list. The great thing about this list, is that it is clearly visible on your twitter homepage and shows which of your twitter followers are tweeting about this (have shared a tweet today with that specific hashtag). This gives you more visibility and is more likely to make people think “hmm what are they tweeting about that for?" So, your followers are more likely to click through to your twitter profile and see what other things you've been tweeting about too.

Here's a nice example of a short and sweet tweet from a Care Opinion subscriber, using relevant hashtags to invite people to share their story...

Next Blogs

Check back every Monday for the next in our series of Social Media Support and Advice Blogs...

Week 2: Use Twitter as a Tool to Generate Stories

Week 3: Make Your Social Media Posts More Visual

Week 4: Why tagging people can help spread your message a little further