Social Media Case Study
Dr Chris Elliot JPCH Online Editor
SocialMedia.JPCHonline.com [email protected]
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
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?
… 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