Funding outcome

Social media is recognized as an important tool for spreading new knowledge and resources to wide audiences. However, it is well acknowledged that using social media effectively requires substantial resources and time. In fall 2019, ECHO (translating Evidence in Child Health to enhance Outcomes) research developed a 12 week long social media campaign to spread an educational video for parents about pediatric bronchiolitis to the general public. Bronchiolitis is caused by a viral infection in the lungs that causes swelling of the airway with thick mucus, sometimes making it difficult for a child to breathe. This campaign included planned social media posts with targeted hashtags and links with planned stakeholders to strategically increase awareness and reach of the bronchiolitis video across Canada. The purpose of this summer research project is to evaluate the effectiveness of the social media campaign, make recommendations for future social media campaigns, and to use the findings to design future social media campaigns. Prior to beginning the campaign, baseline measures were collected for the average website visits per month, number of Twitter followers, impressions, profile visits, and number of Facebook page likes and post reach (number of people who saw a post) for ECHO accounts. We will be collecting the number of bronchiolitis video views on YouTube, characteristics of the viewers, and method of finding the video. We will also assess the web traffic on the parent tool section on the ECHO website, number of new Twitter followers, number of Tweet impressions and Twitter profile visits per month, and number of Facebook page likes. Computer software will be used to manage the data and assess the changes over time. This project will provide urgently needed information to guide future social media campaigns to spread future parent education tools in the ECHO research program as well as other research programs to a wide audience.