Social media in an NHS Trust –10 priorities for 2013

Social media in an NHS Trust –10 priorities for 2013

by | Dec 31, 2012 | mental health, NHS stuff | 6 comments

We’ve spent a lot of energy in our NHS Trust this year getting to grips with social media. It’s been a lot of fun and we’ve had a few hair-raising moments along the way. Below are 10 key learning points from 2012 along with 10 key priorities for 2013: Finding our voice – in our communications team we’ve gone beyond the basics and found our voice on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve reduced the amount we broadcast and got better at sharing useful information and engaging in conversation. In 2013 we’ll continue this trend and I’m keen that we extend this tone to more aspects of our communications, becoming more sociable in every aspect of what we do. Measuring our sociability – we’ve gone beyond using Klout and are experimenting with a variety of free and simple metric tools which are out there such as tweetstats.com, sentiment140.com and socialmention.com. Then there are open source network analysis tools out there such as nodexl which take a bit more work to use.  We will develop our use of more sophisticated tools in 2013 so we can clearly articulate the benefits of social media to any sceptics (even though we intuitively know the value ourselves of course!) Automated tweets – we’ve pretty much ditched automated tweets as it became clear that people found them annoying. In 2013 we’ll continue on this path. #Hashtags – we tweet from a wide range of events and activities using various hashtags and get some interaction but not as much as I’d like. We put out calls for interaction a few days before live tweeting from our Board...

Social media learning curve – 10 tips for NHS Trusts

by | Apr 5, 2012 | NHS stuff | 0 comments

In our NHS trust we’re on a steep social media learning curve when it comes to connecting online with people who have an interest in our organisation. On Twitter we are @LeedsandYorkPFT and on Facebook we have a fan page for Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. We have a Youtube site and are in the process of setting up Pinterest for our campaigning work. So here are ten things we’ve learnt so far: Getting the basics in place – we have a section on our website with guidelines for members of the public about how we use social media.  We have also developed guidelines for our staff and are busy setting up a section of our intranet site to have useful information (such as guidance from professional bodies) in one place.  We find ourselves amending and adding to them as new issues and possibilities arise. Connecting Twitter to Facebook – in the early days we connected our tweets to Facebook but quickly removed this link. As we began tweeting more we worried we risked spamming people with the volume of tweets popping up on Facebook. Secondly, we wanted to use Facebook a bit differently – less frequently but with longer content and photos. We’re about to start experimenting with opinion polls and event invites and generally encourage people to interact with us more on Facebook so separating them made sense. To friend or not to friend – the steer in all the NHS related guidance that we’ve seen is for members of staff to not ‘friend’ anyone on their personal Facebook who is using services provided by...