Thread

After completing a comprehensive analysis of four years of tweets from 44 of the top 50 schools of nursing, I have some advice for schools of nursing:

1/

Use hashtags that other people are using, too.

~90% of the hashtags used by 44 schools of nursing between 9/2018 and 12/2020 were used ten or fewer times across 57,306 tweets.

Around ~50% were used only ONCE.

2/

The vast majority of hashtags used by top-ranked schools of nursing are about..... {drumroll, please}.......

nursing and schools of nursing.

3/

Twitter is a great way to engage journalists but in order to do that effectively, schools of nursing need to use hashtags that journalists might actually be searching for.

4/

Use hashtags that connect to current events and showcase the expertise of your faculty, students, and staff.

If you simply *must* use #nurse, for goodness sake please use another hashtag along with it.

5/

Sadly, I was unable to detect any change in the way schools of nursing use Twitter since the release of the "Woodhull Revisted" study.

I looked at 2 years of data pre-"Woodhull Revisited" and 2 years of data post....

6/

Hashtags can -- and should -- act like a megaphone to attract attention. Schools of nursing are using Twitter like it's two tin cans connected by some string.

7/

If your school of nursing is using Twitter to talk about - and to - nurses, your school is missing out. More importantly, your COMMUNITY is missing out.

8/

Of the 71 hashtags that appeared 100 or more times in the dataset:

None were about racism.

None were about social justice.

None were about health equity.

None were about health disparities.

9

Looking forward to sharing the article once it's published. In the meantime, let's start using hashtags more strategically. :)

/end thread