Tweets for Health: Using Twitter to Convey Simple Health Messages

Hoffman, Rikard and Hughley led a lively interactive session on using Twitter and tweet chat, to communicate with people all over the world.

Twitter is a microblogging platform to access resources you wouldn’t have otherwise — to drive people to your organization’s website, reach experts and stakeholder communities, and connect with them offline. Twitter is also a flexible up-to-the-minute news service; make it whatever you want.

The co-hosts described the culture and language of the twitterverse, including hashtags, retweets, favorites and mentions. They also conducted several activities with the audience, including how to turn a long section into an effective tweet (140 characters or less) with a health literacy focus and setting up an account on tweetchat.com.

They also discussed symplur.com, a measuring company for healthcare tweets, where you can have your hashtags registered and approved at no charge. The company indicates that healthcare tweets are trending upward. Each day, there are 1 million tweets related to healthcare!