Tweet, Share, Inspire

CJ Graham is Project Manager in Community Ophthalmology at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. For her NHS Change Day action this year she is encouraging her healthcare colleagues to use twitter, sharing the benefits of tweeting and she's supporting others to get tweeting.

Twitter is a social media platform where users share tweets of up to 140 characters. Each user has a handle (e.g. @NHSChangeDay), which can be linked to in tweets, or your tweet can include a hashtag (e.g. #100DaysofChange), which can also be followed.

Twitter’s advantage is that is very easy to share and reshare content, and that is a core part of its offer. Therefore, it is very easy to quickly get your message in front of large groups of people. Twitter is a great way to engage with others: you can reply to others tweets, comment on tweets or retweet their tweets. This is a great way to widen the conversation, add value to your message and reach additional people. On Twitter you can share pictures, short video clips and tell stories.

Through Twitter you can share great ideas and good practice to a wide group of people. If you want to shout out about something, to highlight it to others, Twitter is a great medium to reach large numbers quickly. And if you want to show support for someone else's great work or ideas, you can do so by favouriting their tweets, and then by sharing the great idea with your followers, to give the great idea or work further reach. If someone is doing something great, Twitter allows us to share this, to then inspire others.

'I am planning to help colleagues in Health and Social Care to become more confident users of Twitter by running four 30 minute sessions covering the basics' CJ told us.' I will run a homework club, every week, which will cover the following themes:

• Getting set up on Twitter, sending tweets, replying to tweets and using a hashtag
• Twitter etiquette, forming communities on twitter
• Who to follow, retweeting and quoting tweets, tweeting resources like videos etc.
• Using supportive apps like tweetdeck, hootsuite, tweet chat."

Another benefit of twitter is that it allows you to widen the conversation and to link to people who it may be difficult to speak to directly offline. Many trust boards, senior leaders, key players and colleagues are on twitter, and by following them and them following you, you can open up the conversation to a diverse group of people, and communicate with a much wider audience. Twitter allows us to build links and diverse networks, with people that we may not connect with in our daily lives.

Speaking about the popularity of her action, CJ told us: “So far the response has been really positive by those who have attended the first session, and people at work have asked me to do twitter schools in person for their teams. I'm really pleased to help some colleagues become more confident users of twitter, I'm so glad someone gave me the idea because it’s such an easy way of accessing a whole new part of the health and care community.”

If you'd like more information on how to use social media in your practice, then download NHS Change Days' Ridiculously Easy Guide to Social Media.

If you'd like to know more about CJ's twitter homework club then follow #SHCRtwittertwits on Twitter, or you can email her.

You can follow NHS Change Day on Twitter via @NHSChangeDay, #NHSChangeDay or #100DaysofChange.