The theme for the 5th blog in our Social Media Support & Advice series really is a wonderfully simple one... involve your comms team! If you are doing amazing things with Care Opinion within your Patient Experience and Quality Improvement teams, then you really ought to be including your Communications team!

A great way of involving your comms colleagues is to add some team members to your Care Opinion subscription and set them up with a weekly digest and/or alerts to stories. After all, if you're reading this blog you're probably trying to either increase your confidence in sharing and engaging with social media, or you're about to dip your toe in and get started. But, your comms team already have a fountain of knowledge when it comes to, well, communications, and so it only makes sense to keep them involved with your Care Opinion work, both as a whole and your ideas and plans for pushing out this work on social media.

If you are part of an organisation that is a new Care Opinion Partner, you could ask your comms team about writing a press release. Your partnership with Care Opinion and your commitment to learning from and seeking patient feedback on a public platform is news, so why not share it!? We receive so much feedback from people who have shared their story and received a response who wonder why they didn't know about Care Opinion sooner! So, involving your comms team to get the word out there is an important step, plus any coverage you receive can then be further shared on social media to increase awareness. For any support or advice with press releases, just get in touch! We are more than happy to help with copy and send examples.

 If you have a specific project planned or underway within your organisation e.g if you are seeking feedback from carers, then you can set the comms team up to receive an email alert when a story is published by a carer or to a story containing a key word, tag or department. Those stories can then be used to promote the cause or project. (see our previous blog for tips on this!) They can be tweeted out as an example, either a positive example or an example that shows why the campaign is important, and perhaps why you are working to change the way things are. It is an opportunity to ask for more people to share their own experience on Care Opinion and increase the number of stories people are sharing about your services. Email alerts can easily be added for this purpose and turned off again afterwards.

Tag bubble visualisations and word clouds are also fantastic for sharing on social media, not only because they're vibrant, interesting and accessible, but because they publicly demonstrate that your service is listening to feedback and actively learning seeking the areas which may require improvement. It really demonstrates the fact that every voice matters, every piece of feedback shared builds a greater picture that helps your service to continually improve. For help or advice with adding your comms team and setting them up with relevant alerts or supporting to someone to learn how to create visualisations etc just get in touch! email the subscriber support team or info@careopinion.org.uk

Here's a great example that Inclusion recently shared on Facebook: 

Putting these small ideas into practice won't take long and we are here to help you! We'll share everything you share too, as long as you tag us we'll be sure to spot it and share it! Any questions - you know where to find us. The next blog in the series is all about Supporting Social with Subscriber Tagging.