Spreading Science, One Automated Tweet At A Time

Katja Reuter1, PhD, and Anirvan Chatterjee2

Bradley Voytek3, PhD, John Daigre1

1 Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI), University of Southern California (USC) 2 Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI at UCSF), University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

3 University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Department of Neurology

Presented to CTSA Communications Key Functions Committee group, Sep 18, 2013

The Challenge…

Research can...

...help patients learn about their disease…

...and inform about latest treatments options.

But research can only help...

...if people know about it.

Wouldn’t it be great...

...if more people knew about research?

What we did…

We created a technology that

automatically finds topic-specific

research & news…

...and creates tweets.

...to help us reach disease communities and others on Twitter.

Why Twitter?

Because Twitter already includes thousands of people…

…who are part of active disease communities.

How do we know?

For example, within a 24-hour period

there were…

1,500 tweets posted using #diabetes;

reaching 1.6 million Twitter users

Source: Hashtracking.com, Oct 8th, 2012

…making it easy to find and participate in disease-related

conversations.

How does

work?

Science Connect

Research-Related News

For example…

ü  Publications from PubMed

ü  Clinical trials information from ClinicalTrials.gov

ü  Tweets from researchers and University groups

ü  University research news from University Relations ü  Researchers’ profiles

Science Connect automatically scans data sources for disease-specific content

Research-Related News

Science Connect automatically scans data sources for disease-specific content

Research-Related News

Science Connect automatically scans data sources for disease-specific content

…and creates tweets using disease-specific #hashtags and shortened URLs.

Research-Related News

What’s also really neat is...

...users are notified when a new tweet has been created…

...and the tweet is automatically posted to the assigned Twitter account.

Editing a tweet is easy too.

Preliminary Results

Phase 1

After 6 weeks…

We had launched 8 UCSF disease research

Twitter accounts.

https://twitter.com/UCSFRemix/ucsf-disease-research/members

Sep 15, 2013

After 6 weeks

After 10 months

Total number of followers 867

Total number of tweets sent

1,042

Number of clicks by Twitter users

1,149

Number of mentions and retweets by Twitter users

106

Retweets from other UCSF Twitter account

PubMed research papers

Other (University research news clinical trials)

Researchers’ Profiles

What people clicked on

1.54 1.00 0.89 0.64 Clicks per tweet

Phase 2

After 10 months…

After 6 weeks

After 10 months

Total number of followers 867 2,381

Total number of tweets sent

1,042 2,000

Number of clicks by Twitter users

1,149 Analysis ongoing

Number of mentions and retweets by Twitter users

106 Analysis ongoing

Feedback we received so far…

UCSF Science Connect is a great time saver. It helps us by making sure that we don’t miss the latest HIV research conducted at UCSF that’s potentially relevant and interesting to our audience.

Michael Bare, Research Communications Specialist,

Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, UCSF

“

I jumped at the chance to use UCSF Science Connect!  Automating the information-finding step is a great plus for communicators, and the smart hashtagging not only gets the info to a wider audience, it educates us all on leveraging the power of the medium.

Karen Gehrman, Interim Communications Manager, Helen Diller Family Cancer Center, UCSF

“

q  We can increase the reach of research by using social media and connect with disease communities.

q  Automation is not necessarily a bad thing if it is made clear to

audience. q  Using such an approach, communicators can save time and

increase their output.

What we learned

q  More research is necessary to assess

q  the reach of different types of content to benefit diseases communities.

q  what content serves disease communities best. q  if such an approach strengthen an institution’s research

brand. q  if such an approach can foster research participant

recruitment?

Next steps

Thanks!

This project was funded through an IT Innovation Contest Award from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and supported by the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at UCSF.

Images adapted from Google’s Gmail Priority Inbox Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nt3gE9dGHQ