Increasing the Impact of Oral Health Evidence on Social Media

Objectives: To explore various strategies to increase the impact of Cochrane Oral Health (COH)’s systematic reviews on social media channels.
Methods: COH’s remit is to prepare, maintain and disseminate reviews of randomized controlled trials in oral health. As part of COH’s social responsibility to ensure research reaches the widest audience, a blog, Facebook page and Twitter account were established in 2011 to disseminate the results of evidence syntheses. However, take up was slow. A project was launched in 2013 to establish methods of extending COH’s impact by increasing the number of followers and visitors to social media sites.
The following strategies were applied over two years:
1. Twitter: a tweet per day, managed by scheduling software to hit several timezones;
2. Tying in social media activity with awareness events (for example, a blog post about oral cancer evidence in Mouth Cancer Action Month, promoted using relevant hashtags on Twitter and Facebook);
3. Targeting dentists, dental researchers and universities with dental schools to follow on social media;
4. Themed blog posts, highlighting a review of the month, promoted on Twitter and Facebook.

Results: The number of Twitter followers increased from 250 in 2013 to 2,796 by 2015. The blog had 5,831 visitors in 2013, by 2015 this had increased to 14,787. Facebook had 255 page likes in 2013 and 1,120 in 2015. A wider audience has resulted in more interaction on social media and subsequent reposting and retweeting of COH evidence, however it is not clear whether an increase in COH citations and downloads is related to this social media activity.

Conclusions: Employing strategies to improve impact has successfully increased the social media audience, especially on Twitter. Further research is needed to establish whether this has an impact on knowledge and implementation of the evidence base.