General Guidance
- Organize and strategize your content. Use publications, news articles, media clips, data/statistics. Have a plan in place when you begin to disseminate your message(s) through content.
- Identify your target audiences. These include: policymakers, local and national community leaders (i.e. politicians), communities impacted by the central issue, and specific personas that may yield an impact on wider channels.
- Specify your goal in your tweets. Options include: donations, sharing/retweeting the information, sign-ups for workgroups, or newsletters.
- Leverage the power of the hashtag. Also, consider who you may want to tag in your tweets (KOLs—"key opinion leaders"—in your field, researchers, colleagues, friends) that will help you disseminate your message.
- Importantly, consider directing/tagging your tweet towards specific officials or policymakers who might have an impact on your specific message, as well as constituent organizations that are important to you (e.g. @SCAI, @ACCinTouch, @your division or hospital).
- To promote dissemination, consider hashtags in the cardiology/interventional cardiology fields and hashtags for your cause:
- #SCAI
- #SCAIAdvocacy
- #topic of interest (e.g. ISCHEMIA, EXCEL, imagefirst, RCT4Impella)
- Remember to be professional. Issues that affect you and other stakeholders may be controversial and, therefore, incite "back-and-forth" conversations on Twitter. On the one hand, these may be informative and constructive for those following these Twitter feeds, general public, and perhaps even the KOLs or officials that might be tagged on these tweets. However, being adversarial or disrespectful—particularly with respect to directed tweets towards a policymaker—may in fact be counterproductive to your cause.