These are the notes that accompanied the slide deck on using social media to share your science. If you have any questions, please get in touch - @brynphd.

1. Notes to Accompany Slides for Explore! April 2019 Session
All in a Twitter: Using Social Media to Share Your Science
Opportunity Areas
Our current methods of knowledge dissemination and implementation are not doing too well. For
example, Tutelman et al., 2018 noted the following statistics about our historical efforts to put research
into practice:
• 86% of research evidence fails to be adopted into clinical practice (Scott et al., 2013)
• If it is, it is implemented with a 17-year delay (Morris, Wooding, & Grant, 2011).
• High volume of new literature each year: estimated that over 2.5 million new papers are
published each year (Jinha, 2010)
Audience
Who are you trying to target with your research findings?
Try to be as specific as possible and show that you really understand your audience and their needs (i.e.
don’t just say “clinicians” – what kind of clinicians, what decision-making authority do they have, etc.?)
Target audiences could include:
• community-based and not-for-profit organizations
• general public
• health care professionals/service providers
• health system administrators/managers
• industry/venture capital group
• media (print, TV, etc.)
• patients/consumers
• policy makers/legislators
• private sector
• research funders
• researchers
Objectives (Long-Term Goals of your KT)
What are you trying to achieve with your KT?
You may have one overall goal, or several different goals for different aspects of your research. Here is
where you may also link your research goals or objectives with your KT goals; in other words, where you
operationalize your research impact. Some common KT goals include “raising awareness” and/or
“promoting action”. KT goals could include:
• increase knowledge/awareness
• inform future research
• inform/change attitudes
• inform/change behaviour
• inform/change policy
• inform/change practice
• inform/change technology

2. The Shorter-Term Goals
Very broadly, perhaps you are interested in increasing knowledge or awareness; informing practice
and/or policy changes, or future research; and/or changing attitudes or behaviours.
So, to start, ask yourself: Why do you want to use social media? This is setting the objectives of your
own communications plan.
Here are some examples - you can add more; you can set as many as you need to accomplish all that
you want to do. Keep in mind, though, that each of these objectives will need an associated audience(s),
activities, and way to measure how well you did:
• Build/Expand Your Network: Directly access variety of people: decision-makers, non-profits,
other academics and clinicians, patients and families. Because social media is free and widely
accessible, you can connect with a breadth of individuals and meet key figures, engaging in real-
time conversations about issues. Know people before the next meeting or conference.
• Keep Up-to-Date on Latest Clinical Evidence: More and more, research just published or
presented is also shared via social media. Case studies can be discussed quickly and you can get
new ideas for practice through these exchanges. You can easily engage in dialogue with the
authors and with others in your network, without the need per se for formal meetings.
• Promote Your Own Research and Disseminate to a Wider Audience: You can create web-
friendly visual abstracts or infographics to accompany your upcoming paper publication or talk
at a conference, sharing it at the same time so that it gets more traction.
• Enrich Your Conference Experiences: Participate in the “conference behind the conference” -
the dialogues that are happening by conference participants, and searchable using official
conference titles or “hashtags”. Or, if you cannot attend, you can watch these conversations and
sometimes even the live conference in real time.
• Recruit More Participants: Long gone are the days that you need to defend use of electronic
recruitment methods. You can share links to study information and/or online measurement
tools. Just be mindful of any ethical considerations and ensure that you have some
communication strategies prepared for this.
What are you hoping to achieve by putting your science on social media?
Strategy
What is the most appropriate way to achieve your KT goal, for your given audience?
Think about the different social media tools here.
Resources
What do need to make this happen?
Is it other colleagues? Digital design resources?

3. To choose one or more social media platforms, ask yourself this question:
What is it that you want to share?
If you want to share information in a way that builds relationships: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
Can share images and videos, but these are primarily text-based platforms
• Twitter is good for bite-size information, networking and engaging in discussions
• LinkedIn is more formal and geared towards almost a living “resume” network
• Facebook is more informal
If you want to share information visually: Instagram, YouTube
If you want to curate content that reflects interests: Pinterest
If you want to discuss topics on a more anonymous scale: various discussion board platforms like Reddit.
Evaluation
How will you know any of this worked?
Social media comes with some built-in ways of evaluating (e.g., likes, retweets or shares, # times link is
clicked, etc.)
• Volume: “It’s the number of messages about your brand, as well as the number of people
talking about your brand, and track how both of those numbers change over time.” Look to
tools built into the social media platforms you’re using, as well as web hosts (e.g., Facebook
Insights; Twitter Analytics; Google Analytics)
• Reach is useful as a denominator to compare with other metrics, like engagements: # times
article is clicked, # likes or retweets or shares
• Engagement can be defined in a number of ways, and depends on what your goals are. Do you
want to generate interaction (replies, comments) or spread a message (retweets and posts)?
• Influence: There are services out there to help quantify influence; also interesting to look at
whose messages get shared after they share yours, not necessarily by # followers alone.
https://neilpatel.com/blog/essential-social-media-metrics/
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-metrics/  This one has great tips for creating evaluation
metrics!

4. (Re)defining Social Media
Typically, a lot of what we encounter as users of social media is produced passively:
Content is pushed to our social media feeds, either by other users or by companies, and we absorb it to
a small degree, scrolling through and clicking like to show that we saw it. Increasingly, it’s become more
and more disengaged.
Essentially, the user is creating content, and like throwing spaghetti at the wall, we hope that some of it
sticks.
In many ways, this is similar to what we’ve done with traditional ways of sharing science. We produce a
poster for a conference, and hopefully get an interaction with another human being at some point, and
that our bombarding of information stands up.
I emphasize “create online communities” because it is where you are going to get the most value - the
two-way communication between users, creating dialogue and language and shared meaning that will
ultimately enhance and move a discussion forward.
Remember to participate! Engage with others regularly and build a following - this will take a while but
will help you to build that steady engagement.
• So, if you want more networking - comment, DM, reach out to people whose work you follow,
engage with people using conference hashtags!
• Share your science? Think of the audience on the social media platform - key demographics
using each platform – and tweak message/design appropriately.
• Keeping up with latest research? Spend an afternoon to find key accounts to follow - journals,
research groups, researchers. You can curate as you go - some won’t be as active, others won’t
end up being as useful as others. But it’s professional development time well spent.

5. Examples of Social Media Working for Science
1. A great example of this was for this talk! I sent out this tweet last week to get more ideas for
what I had in mind, and was delighted, not 15 minutes later, to have a reply with visual abstract
and link to a paper on this very topic from the Chambers lab at Dalhousie. (Thanks, Perri!) I also
got a few more comments (3) and such, because of the retweets (4) and likes (13) that you see
in the graphic.
2. #VisualAbstracts are a simple tool to promote sharing of your science. By boiling your results
into the very, VERY essential messages, we can distill our work into lay language and ensure
researchers and non-researchers will want to engage with our work. Those wanting more
technical details can follow the paper link. If you’re interested in doing more of these to share
via social media, I’d recommend following @AndrewMIbrahim, a surgeon at University of
Michigan: https://www.surgeryredesign.com/resources. BMJ also publishes visual abstracts:
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj-visual-abstracts
3. When I was working with the Maritime SPOR SUPPORT Unit (MSSU), we hosted a couple of
these “tweetchats”, the most successful of these being held immediately after a webinar.
(We’ve found that this model helps to keep conversation flowing.) You can be successful in
these by, again, drafting a communications plan: in this case – Identifying who you want to
target in general and then specific users/accounts to help spread the word; Creating a quick
graphic that others can share; This graphic has the specific hashtag that can be used to a) tag all
the tweets for your chat participants; and b) help you summarize all the great points once
completed; and creating a “script” with specific times attached to each tweet; you can put these
in Twitter to make sure word counts are acceptable, then storing it in a Word document. Having
a couple of people, if possible, help is good. One can send out the questions according to your
schedule; another can help poke and prod discussion (if needed!)
4. This example is how you can search conversations on social media to help inform your own
practice. #HowTo Engage Patients is an open-access Google site that I made to house all the
tweets freely available under the hashtags #HowToPtEngagement and
#HowNotToPtEngagement. I started following these two conversations; first, the negative, as
stories were shared about examples of poor patient integration into healthcare research; this
then was flipped to mention more positive experiences. As a burgeoning health research
professional, I started the website initially as a way to keep all these great thoughts and blogs
and references in one spot, as well as find a way to categorize into the emerging themes. But I
also wanted to ensure proper acknowledgement for all the quotes, too. I was updating it about
once a quarter, until the last update; the individual who started the hashtags, @couragesings,
has suggested a re-tooling since the hashtag has simmered down, and so they are currently
making suggestions that I can upload.
(I want to contrast this activity with other activities that use social media as a source of data,
especially without consent and/or using deception to procure said data. To that end,I would
suggest you peruse the literature and consult your local ethics departments on these practices.
One such article recently published is by Chiauzzi and Wicks (2019): Chiauzzi E1
, Wicks P#1
. Digital
Trespass: Ethical and Terms-of-Use Violations by Researchers Accessing Data From an Online
Patient Community. J Med Internet Res. 2019 Feb 21;21(2):e11985. doi: 10.2196/11985.

6. Consider yourself and your online presence as a “brand”, and be strategic.
• What’s your voice? Your online brand? Spontaneity but always considering the voice
• Personalize how you say things, how you share things. These platforms allow for a bit of
personality to shine through, so don’t be afraid to do that.
Conclusions
Positive correlation between social media engagement and traditional ways that we have measured
scholarly activity (Pascoe, 2018); this is important, as there is less time to see when the paper reaches
people and is cited in other publications - as opposed to waiting for that year or two for the publications
to accumulate
We need to do better to share our work and ensure that it is used to improve decision-making in
practice, and healthcare policy development.
One such method can be the use of social media to share our science.
Additional Resources You Can Check Out:
• Five Ways Scientists SHOULD Be Using Twitter: http://hellophd.com/2017/03/069-5-ways-
scientists-twitter
• The Benefits of Twitter for Scientists: https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/macroscope/the-
benefits-of-twitter-for-scientists
• Twitter Newbie? A Scientist’s Guide: https://tipbox.abcam.com/twitter-newbie-a-scientists-
guide/