Article type
Abstract
There is limited use of social media as an approach to communicating evidence for development, policy, and practice. Social media is fraught with fake news, alternative truth, misinformation, and disinformation, whereas these platforms could be exploited for the dissemination of evidence by scientists.
We aimed to communicate evidence for research and development to stakeholders in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs).
We engaged social media platforms targeting LMICs including Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. We targeted development actors, policy makers, practitioners, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), and the public. We used information from research evidence, evidence implementation projects, primary studies, systematic reviews, and evidence informed policies to craft posts for social media platforms.
We extracted data from Twitter Analytics to elicit tweet engagement trends. We extracted data from Facebook Insights to elicit post engagement trends. We did not explore analytics for YouTube and LinkedIn (we plan to do this before the conference). Getting content on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn was challenging due to platform and bandwidth usage. We used WhatsApp as a platform to drive traffic to social media platforms especially Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Our 831 tweets reached 351,700 impressions and 35,733 engagements. Our interventions on Facebook reached 11,867 people. We increased our followership at an average rate of 55 [Range:16-95].
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube remain the best options for communicating research evidence. TikTok is a promising approach that requires higher investments in terms of time and skills.
The public and consumers benefited through sensitization on social media. Junior parliamentarians, who are policymakers were trained to be ambassadors of Fact Checking in their communities.
We aimed to communicate evidence for research and development to stakeholders in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs).
We engaged social media platforms targeting LMICs including Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. We targeted development actors, policy makers, practitioners, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), and the public. We used information from research evidence, evidence implementation projects, primary studies, systematic reviews, and evidence informed policies to craft posts for social media platforms.
We extracted data from Twitter Analytics to elicit tweet engagement trends. We extracted data from Facebook Insights to elicit post engagement trends. We did not explore analytics for YouTube and LinkedIn (we plan to do this before the conference). Getting content on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn was challenging due to platform and bandwidth usage. We used WhatsApp as a platform to drive traffic to social media platforms especially Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Our 831 tweets reached 351,700 impressions and 35,733 engagements. Our interventions on Facebook reached 11,867 people. We increased our followership at an average rate of 55 [Range:16-95].
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube remain the best options for communicating research evidence. TikTok is a promising approach that requires higher investments in terms of time and skills.
The public and consumers benefited through sensitization on social media. Junior parliamentarians, who are policymakers were trained to be ambassadors of Fact Checking in their communities.