Background: Many Cochrane reviews relate to common health conditions and could be used by many people making decisions about their health. An obstacle is that they may never have heard of Cochrane, perhaps know nothing about evidence-informed decision-making and aren’t looking for evidence. Social media offers unprecedented opportunities to reach these new audiences.
Objectives: Cochrane UK shares evidence primarily though a weekly blog, 'Evidently Cochrane', and Twitter. We had established a format for the blogs, mostly aimed at patients, which set the evidence in context, gave the main findings and a key message and talked about the strength of the evidence. We sought to expand our audience by experimenting with new ways to present Cochrane evidence, which would make it engaging, relatable and easy to understand.
Methods: We introduced quarterly campaign weeks on popular topics (men’s health, palliative care, the menopause), linking in with national events. We invited blogs and commentary from ‘experts’, both health professionals and patients (our youngest blogger being just nine), exploring evidence in the context of experience. Through Advent we published daily posts in varied formats from Lego animations to a film of a pantomime cast talking about Cochrane evidence. We have also blogged responsively to feature evidence relating to health topics that came under the media spotlight.
Results: Cochrane UK has a growing following and we are enjoying frequent interactions on Twitter. The blog has been selected by public vote as one of the top ten health organization blogs in the forthcoming UK Blog Awards 2015. Our activities have helped us establish new relationships and created opportunities for collaboration.
Conclusions: Innovative use of social media is enabling us to increase our reach, bring evidence to new audiences and create new partnerships. We’re looking forward to seeing what we can do next!