How to Develop Social Media Messages That Do Not "Turn Off" Your Audience

Background: Social Media has become the most attractive method for reaching people, placing both wanted and unwanted messages in their hands. Almost everyone has a smart phone. What if your messages were in the hands of the exact people you were attempting to reach, at the exact time you're trying to reach them? How would this enhance your program, service or company?

Program background: Research conducted by Bee Busy Wellness Center and Bee Busy, Inc's social media teams suggests that today's Internet users spend a tremendous amount of time on social media. There is a documented 4.2 billion users online. The average person has 5.4 social media accounts. There is a new social media user every 10 seconds. At least 81% of all small and medium businesses in the world have a social media presence. Creating the right message, for the right people, at the right time, for the right purpose is as important as providing patients with their rights or performing medication rights. Our research indicates that the right message for the right person encourages them to react. We have developed an unprecedented social media platform in Houston, TX that is reaching the hardest to reach populations: Transgender Women of Color, African American and Hispanic MSM and African American Women. Our goal is to provide technical assistance to everyone wishing to establish social media and marketing campaigns targeting those hardest to reach populations.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Over the past four years, Bee Busy Inc and Bee Busy Wellness Center have been monitoring our social media prevalence and its impact on health and wellness in the Houston area. We have monitored our marketing budgets and have reviewed our processes for community outreach in Houston, TX (2014-2018). Our goal was to improve the quality of health in the Houston among African American and Hispanic people in low income communities. Over that time period, more than 500,000 persons were engaged with our social media campaigns. Overall health and wellness of the patients has improved by more than 40%. And interaction with the companies have improved by over 63%.

Conclusions: The social media projects were successful at encouraging patients to seek linkages to care, HIV screening and treatment services. Both Bee Busy Wellness Center and Bee Busy, Inc have documented increased patients due to the social media campaigns. In an effort to increase health literacy in the community, we also increased provider's cultural awareness and built bridges from patients to health care services, that otherwise may have gone undeveloped. This has proven to be a low cost, sustainable method for providing health literacy, health education, health resources and preventive health messages to the targeted populations.

Implications for research and/or practice: There is definite implications for research and certainly utilizing Best Practices as defined by Bee Busy or another company should be employed at other non-profit, health care facilities.