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Sudeep Uprety, Research Uptake and Communications Officer at HERD shares his experience of using social media professionally. Recently, he oriented HERD staff members on professional use of social media.

After work all day in the 14-inch computer, we generally head towards the 5-inch smart phones. With the touch features, we want to get in touch with the rest of the world – our family, friends and rest of the world. This is the world of social media. 

The Power of Social Media

As a development communications professional, it has been about 15 months of my engagement into the world of websites – trying to understand the ‘context’ of communications – what it entails and how it is done. Using social media to highlight HERD’s work has been a wonderful and fulfilling journey so far. It all started in early 2015 when we facilitated the Joint Annual Review of the health sector in February, 2015. Using Twitter to cover the major highlights of the event was an instant hit. That’s when I realised the power of social media.

Recently, we did an analysis of HERD’s performance in social media of 4 months (February, March, April and May) using various online analytical tools. Our efforts of working almost 16 hours every day yielded good results: in the four months, we were able to gain 146 new followers on Twitter with 2969 profile visits and about 80,000 tweet impressions. On Facebook, we received a page rank of 71 – considered above average rank for NGOs (average rank for NGOs is 58). On LinkedIn too, we had a limited network constraint (2.82 out of 100 points).

‘Institutionalising’ Social Media

Sustainability of success always remains a major challenge. So, we felt the need of ‘institutionalising’ our good practice. So, a sharing session on ‘Using Social Media Professionally’ was conducted on June 29, 2015 with the purpose of orienting HERD staff members about the benefits of professional use of social media – both for the institutional and individual benefit. In order to ensure that the orientation was need based, I requested HERD staff members to fill up an online form to express their expectation for the orientation session and which social media site they would prefer learning about. Based on their responses, I designed the orientation session and focused more on using LinkedIn and Twitter professionally. I practically displayed them how to manage social media accounts. The orientation session included the following content:

• Why professionals use LinkedIn?
• Getting started on LinkedIn
• Managing LinkedIn profile
• How to write a LinkedIn profile summary
• Developing and expanding networks through LinkedIn
• Things not to do on LinkedIn
• Why professionals use Twitter?
• Getting started on Twitter
• Key messaging is the key
• Whom to follow and why to follow on Twitter?
• The Hashtag
• Retweets, Favourites and Direct Messages
• What not to do with Twitter
• Using Facebook professionally

Feedback for Improvement

After the orientation was over, the obvious question that struck my mind was – “was it useful?” I could ask some of the participants but I also wanted to ensure that I get an honest opinion. So, I developed an online feedback form to hear from them.

As per their responses (8 staff members had responded out of 18 who had attended the orientation session), in the scale of 1 to 10, the effectiveness of the training was 9. All respondents opined that the session improved their current knowledge about professional use of social media. As I had developed my session focusing especially on LinkedIn, they found the session on LinkedIn most effective. In terms of my performance as a facilitator/trainer, I received the score of 9. Some of the reactions to my facilitation skills by the participants were:

• “Brilliant. May be we can add Q&A session at the end. Though it was least required today. Thank you for your sharing. It was very useful.”
• “I think it was perfect and would like to suggest for some more information in the future.”
• “Need to manage time of orientation. Timely completion should also be considered while conducting such sessions.”

The participants also expressed their interests in learning about other topics/issues during future orientation sessions such as:

• Improving writing and best documenting our work without exaggeration
• Using Google+ and its effectiveness
• Innovative ideas related to health, research findings and how to explore and write creative articles on health

Effectiveness of any orientation can be evaluated only when it comes to real practice. Hope the session instigates the change in a positive way.

The presentation can be viewed and downloaded from this link.