Triage Social Media

03 Jul Triage Social Media

Posted at 10:31h in Practical Tips by Triage Cancer

Are you a cancer survivor or caregiver and wondering if social media can provide valuable cancer-related information and support?

Are you an oncology health care professional wondering why anyone should have a Twitter account?

Followers, friends, likes, tweets, Google groups, channels, circles, feeds . . . social media lingo can keep your head spinning. And there are new platforms popping up every day.

Using social media to share messages, photos, and video, is a great way to help promote your organization and to network with friends and professionals.

Social media can also provide powerful insight into what others think and has the force and reach to make advocacy, activism, and sharing of experiences easier than ever before.

Whether you are a cancer survivor, caregiver, advocate or health care professional, social media can serve as free and easy-to-use research tools to find out the latest news on the topics that are of interest to you and your patients, such as information about medical advances, cancer community resources, and events as well as provide a forum for support.

We will be posting over the next few weeks about different social media platforms that might provide useful ways for you to get valuable information related to the cancer community. We will also be talking about how to protect your privacy while using social media accounts and some platforms that may specifically be useful to the cancer community.

In the meantime, here are some helpful Twitter definitions and tips to help you master some social media lingo:

Tweet: a message that people share with their followers up to 140 characters, including spaces
Handle: Your twitter name, which is noted by putting the @ sign in from of your twitter name. For example, Triage Cancer’s twitter handle is @TriageCancer
Followers: these are people on Twitter who have signed up to receive your tweets
Hashtag: a way to search Twitter for all tweets that include a particular topic/word, by putting a pound sign in front of that word in your tweet. If you want your tweet to be included in a search for the word cancer, you, would add #cancer to your tweet
Trending Topics: the hottest topics on Twitter at the moment
RT = Retweet, indicating a posting is a reposing of another person's tweet
DM = Direct Message: you can send a private message through Twitter to anyone who follows you on Twitter

Check out these other useful social media resources:

www.journalism.org/files/2013/11/News-Use-Across-Social-Media-Platforms1.pdf

www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/tools/guidelines/pdf/socialmediatoolkit_bm.pdf

Be sure to stay connected with Triage Cancer through our social media platforms!