Communicating and Conducting Research through Social Media Lessons Learned from an Academic Research Centre Robin Featherstone, MLIS; Michele Hamm, PhD; Lisa Hartling, PhD Alberta Research Centre for Health Evidence Department of Pediatrics, University of Alberta

Alberta Research Centre for Health Evidence www.ualberta.ca/ARCHE

@arche4evidence

(2) Academics and health

PROFESSIONALS

(1) PARENTS and child caregivers

The @arche4evidence Twitter feed communicated information about the activities of the centre.

INTRODUCTION

RESULTS

CONCLUSION

OUTCH study Facebook and Twitter profiles recruited parents for a survey on pediatric health outcomes.

2 audiences were targeted:

ANALYTICS Google Analytics, Twitonomy and Altmetrics were used to assess performance of the social media strategies.

Of the 68 OUTCH participants recruited through social media,

84% came from

Facebook.

Of 191 visitors to the ARCHE website,

59% came from Twitter.

From preliminary results, Facebook has shown potential for engaging a consumer audience, while Twitter has helped the research centre reach a professional audience. The embedded librarian established a new role managing and monitoring the performance of social media presences.

ARCHE’s most frequently mentioned

publication received 268 tweets from

242 accounts with an upper bound of

264,273 followers.

In 2013 an ARCHE research associate and a embedded health librarian developed Twitter and Facebook presences for stakeholder engagement.