Twitter: Short, Sweet, & to the Point

Twitter brings a simple, clean element to the social media platforms in my eyes.  Twitter allows for short, quick statements coming and going in every direction possible.  Interactions are quick and to the point.  These interactions are coming from an array of people: personal or organizations.

The amount of characters limited in one tweet may be sleek and to the point, but it can easily cause problems for health organizations attempting to get information out.  Organizations would need to communicate to users in 140 characters or less.  The tweets would need to be attractive to users and informational all at the same time. 

The Mashable article could easily be utilized by health organizations to improve their presence on Twitter.  @ClevelandClinic takes into consideration a lot of these tips.  Cleveland Clinic does a great job of having less structure.  Many of their tweets incorpoFarate regular day-to-day life for Cleveland Clinic employees.  Pictures of their lounge area at the clinic are featured on Twitter.


Featuring personal pictures aside from a constant feed of information gives Cleveland Clinic a sense of feeling real to the user.  I personally like seeing a break in information and can relate to personal items from an organization. 

On a separate article from Mashable, Social Media is said to be a large distraction to individuals at work.  This article in particular points out that Twitter contains 400 million tweets per day.  This large distraction could potentially be a benfit for health organizations.  During an employees time of distraction they could be taking in constant information from Twitter. 

The article includes an infographic showing the possible loss from employees using Facebook, Twitter, and email:

   

I had not previously heard of Tweet Chat prior to reading the Health Works Collective article.  The growth of organzations after holding/being apart of these chats should be motivation enough for any organization to have such a chat.  The popularity of Heath Literacy Missouri (HLM) after a tweet chat alone is amazing to me. After a tweet chat HLM increased its network by 1000. 

1000!

 

1 0 0 0

 

ONE - THOUSAND !

 

That number is larger than some organzations ever have.  All of this occured through Twitter.  The simple, short, and sweet Twitter.  Why wouldn't a health organization want to take on the challenge of educating and attracting the public through 140 characters or less.