Social Media Case Study

Dr Chris Elliot JPCH Online Editor

SocialMedia.JPCHonline.com editor@JPCHonline.com

We’re going to discuss how we at the Journal of Paediatrics and Child

Health started on social media

Let’s start with an example…

… of how we used social media to promote this Editorial:

We sent 3 tweets over 10 minutes on the morning it was published

and over the next 48 hours saw…

188 tweets

from 152 users reaching up to 193,030 people

This presentation is about 3 questions…

How did this happen? Is it meaningful? Is it reproducible?

Or in other words…

What was our strategy? How did we define success? What else have we achieved?

First though: who are we?

Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health

(‘JPCH’ to our friends)

For 50 years we have published articles on children’s health and

wellbeing for surgeons, neonatologists and

paediatricians

Also, we’re not afraid of being used

for craft once the journal has been

read

Back to social media…

Our Social Media vision was pretty simple

1. Be useful To our Readers To our Authors

2. Promote awareness of the journal

We decided what ‘success’ would look like

First by looking at our peers …

In August 2013 we did an audit of other journals in our field and how

large their social media accounts were

NEJM BMJ

440,000 131,000 17,000 82,000

MJA 413 ? ADC 639 ?

Audit - August 2013

The big ones were pretty huge

Even the smaller journals had been in this space for 4 years or more…

… and in the 2 years since that audit, big and small alike have about tripled their followers:

NEJM 440,000 131,000 17,000 82,000

MJA 413 ? ADC 639 ?

2010 2010

1.26m

Audit - August 2013

ADC 1,763 2,700

Audit – October 2015

Does lots of followers mean lots of readers?

Actually, much less than we expected

BMJ.com =

Most comments

12

1,000,000visits / month

Most read

8,300 Most listened

369 Forum views : comments

100: 1 at August 2013

An analysis of 1 million tweets found quite low levels of engagement (clicks)

with each tweet:

1-2 per 1,000 followers

per tweet https://blog.bufferapp.com/twitter-data-1-million-tweets

engagements

Also – success takes longer than we thought

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/why-content-marketing-fails

We decided to have a go anyway…

… on Twitter and Facebook… (it seemed like everyone was doing them)

… but we needed an email address to sign up

@

So we registered a domain name and email with Google Apps

(it’s about $75 per year)

We started using and making images

Built a timeline on Facebook

And a website portal…

The portal was optional, but it gave us cheap online flexibility we didn’t

get with our publisher’s website

How did we do?

192 37/day

387 300/day

Followers Av Reach

387 110,000 / year

192 13,500 / year

October 2015

Where are our followers?

Australia Canada New Zealand India Malaysia Ireland United States of America Singapore Egypt United Kingdom

Australia Canada New Zealand India Malaysia Ireland United States of America Singapore Egypt United Kingdom

Is It Meaningful?

We had decided to invite parents and children to write

directly for the journal about their experience

of illness and healthcare

Very, very few health journals do this

We started with a tweet…

Linked to a webpage…

Added a media article…

And six months later have 8 submissions accepted for

publication…

… and published our first one

8 Submissions Accepted

Could we have achieved this without social media?

Probably yes.

… but we’re a journal that is exclusively read by health

professionals.

What better way to invite non-professionals to contribute?

Is it Reproducible?

Remember the Editorial?

188 tweets

from 152 users reaching up to 193,030 people

This is how that happened…

Some influential people on Twitter shared our tweet

Some people read our tweet and shared it in their own way

Some people shared it independently of our tweets

Could we achieve that again?

We tweeted another strong article about refugee health…

Overall we saw 89 tweets

By 85 people

Reaching up to 254,613 followers

In 48 hours we had 23 re-tweets

It’s reproducible.

These were, however, on topics of high interest to a wider-than-usual

audience for our journal

Behind the Scenes We use other applications

More about these, including links, at SocialMedia.JPCHonline.com

There are

risks Rewards

Loss of Editorial Control (the social media editor has high

exposure for errors of fact, interpretation or judgement)

Hacked Accounts

There are rewards

Realistic Probably modest

Meaningful Rewards

Thank you!

Visit SocialMedia.JPCHonline.com