Leveraging Community Ambassadors for HIV Prevention: A World AIDS Day Social Media Evaluation

Background:

Popular opinion leaders (POLs) play a critical role in health promotion and education efforts as their influence and connections to the community provide insider knowledge to support tailored messaging and interventions. With the rise of social media, POLs have been able to reach and engage with their communities in larger numbers and share messaging in new and innovative ways. This presentation will provide an example of how POLs can be utilized within the context of an HIV social marketing campaign to promote HIV awareness to priority audiences on social media.

Program background:

CDC’s Let’s Stop HIV Together (Together) campaign is a national social marketing campaign aimed at reducing HIV stigma and promoting HIV testing, prevention, and treatment. The Together portfolio includes tactics such as events, materials development and dissemination, media buys, social media, observances of Awareness Days, and strategic partnerships with POLs and organizations. The POLs, known as Together Ambassadors, are recruited to facilitate and expand HIV conversations with priority audiences, which includes gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, transgender people, African American/Black people, Hispanic/Latino people, and people with HIV. Sixteen Ambassadors were chosen for 2022-2023 based on their connections to Together’s priority audiences and their ability to expand the reach and engagement of Together’s existing efforts.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

Ambassadors self-reported their social media data for posts containing HIV messaging via spreadsheet and directly into a SQL database. Analysis was limited to posts associated with World AIDS Day (WAD) 2022 to provide an example of how POLs can be used to boost the conversation for a specific Awareness Day. Quantitative data was examined and used to calculate social media metrics including engagement rate by impressions (ERI). For WAD 2022, Ambassadors reported 44 social media posts which garnered 18,248 impressions and 3,227 engagements, resulting in an ERI of 17.68. Posts that were reported as directed toward priority audiences achieved a higher ERI (19.05) than those directed at the general public (11.06).

Conclusions:

The Together Ambassadors program was able to leverage the social media networks of the Ambassadors to reach priority audiences and engage with WAD 2022 messaging. The Ambassadors’ experience and connections to the priority audiences establish them as trusted advocates for their communities and allows them to connect with their peers in ways that would be more challenging for the CDC to engage these populations. This illustrates the importance of including local opinion leaders to extend HIV prevention and treatment messaging.

Implications for research and/or practice:

The results of this analysis build on the existing evidence demonstrating the importance of utilizing POLs in health promotion efforts. Additionally, given the ever-increasing presence of social media, the results support that utilizing POLs in a digital space is an effective strategy to increasing engagement with messaging by priority audiences as well as expanding the reach of social marketing campaigns. These results should be considered when identifying partners for digital campaigns to receive greater exposure to and acceptance by the priority audiences.