Social media tips for regions and branches

Twitter:

1. Always use an image and centre your message on the visual. Twitter is brief and impulsive, and can be used to lead to other content when more engagement than “liking” is necessary. Essentially, it’s very often about getting people to like your picture so that they want to promote your message – so make sure your picture is good. People like smiling faces – and biomedical scientists tend to like certain kinds of niche scientific imagery (if it’s related to a breakthrough or technological advance).

2. Have fun! It’s nice to engage with positive members who are out there engaging with the public or the development of those around them. Feel free to add positive GIFs and emojis to threads to show your support.

3. When sharing pictures sourced from the internet, it’s best practice to get permission first, especially if you’re sharing from an artist’s page. You can also search for pictures on pexels.com or Wikimedia for royalty free images in the public domain that you can use.

4. Take care with the presentation of content. Make sure that there are no typos, misspellings or grammatical errors.

5. Give value to your audience and engage with any requests for advice or any questions they may have that you can help them with. If you are unsure, or think we can help, contact us.

6. Remember to tag @IBMScience to your any messages you want us to share with our followers. If you don’t, it is unlikely that we will see it – we monitor our notifications, not our feed.

[Please note, do not use “@IBMScience” at the start of a message as this produces a

direct tweet that only we will see. It will not appear in your followers’ feeds. ]

7. For Region and Branch accounts we ask that you refrain from offering personal opinions and be mindful of what you post, comment on or like. If you are in doubt about the @IBMScience position on a particular issue, please contact us to clarify first. Generally, @IBMScience restricts what it likes and retweets – we try to stay on message with positive stories and relevant information for and about the profession. As a professional body, we are apolitical (representing a vast variety of voices and positions) so we will only take a position on political events/current affairs when we are concerned that they may directly affect quality standards and good practice in biomedical science. If you think an issue has arisen that the IBMS needs to take a position on, please contact us before tweeting as we will need to have a statement written in an official capacity.

8. Liking tweets is good for networking (people appreciate the engagement) and it doesn’t clog up your feed. So do take the time to “like” things that people in your network are doing – because it will bring those people back to your profile. Only retweet when you are genuinely (and professionally) interested in what you’re seeing or you think the message is worth your region/branch celebrating – and spread retweets out so people don’t see four from you in their feeds all at once.

9. Hashtags: for individuals who only care about the number of followers they can attract, using the trending hashtags in the left-hand column is a must. For us, however, hashtags are more useful for indexing topics so that they become searchable (IE: #IBMSChat) and starting campaigns amongst our followers (IE: #AtTheHeartOfHealthcare). Hashtags also catch the eye so it is worth putting one before your buzzwords (IE: #haematology) in order to arrest the attention of your general interest followers who are scanning their feeds.

10. In the unlikely event someone complains or you receive negative feedback on your posts

or timeline, seek advice from @IBMScience. We’ll help you deal with the complaint or respond to a negative comment.

11. The IBMS communications team regularly monitors social media, including in the evening and at weekends. If there is something you need us to assist you with, or have a problem you need us to address, you can send us a direct (private) message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we pick it up.

Facebook

1. Facebook is currently the easiest and most active place to build an engaged and thriving online community. Setting up a page or a group and inviting people to like it or join is the best and easiest way to reach relevant people with your news and information. It’s also an easier platform to look after as you can manage who joins and moderate members’ content.

2. Facebook posts don’t necessarily get posted into all of your followers’ timelines. The more likes and comments you get, the more likely your post will appear in your followers’ feeds. This means you have to make an impact on the first people who see the post. To do this some people say there are three golden rules:

Relevant - posts reach further if people are likely to comment on them. Is it a hot topic?Timely - is it about something happening right now?Relatable - is it likely that people will think other people (namely their friends) might want to see it? How shareable is it? Does it pull at the heartstrings?

3. Again, always use an image. In the general hubbub of a Facebook timeline, people’s eyes glide over posts that don’t contain images. If you want people to read your words, you first have to arrest their eyes with a picture. It should be something relevant to your subject – preferably with striking colours and good visual balance. If an image looks like an amateur took or framed it – people will not expect the copy/information/article to be good either. Pictures with smiling faces tend to get the most attention but lots of things can work.

4. Ask a question. Start a conversation with your followers, it helps engage them with your posts and build an audience.

5. Don’t be defensive. If people start attacking your posts or commenting negatively, the best response is often no response. Your followers will see trolls and moody people for what they are and will prefer not to see you awkwardly trying to create a dialogue – they may even respond on your behalf. If you do feel that a response is necessary, just be sure to do so in a calm and reasonable

manner - aiming to keep the peace. If a comment is overtly offensive, you can also mute or block the person from your page. Muting will restrict their comments to be seen by only them and their friends, whilst blocking will ban them from the page.

6. If you have any practical questions about setting up your page or account just let us know: communications@ibms.org