Virtual Dissemination Strategies to Raise Awareness of a Community-drive COVID-19 Testing Program

ARIEL COHEN
University of California San Diego

Dissemination through social media can be an effective strategy in developing and strengthening community engagement/awareness of community-driven research programs. One such NIH-funded program is CO-CREATE (Community-Driven Optimization of COVID-19 Testing to Reach and Engage underserved Areas for Testing Equity), which aims to promote equity in COVID-19 testing for underserved communities. We describe use of two social media outlets (Instagram and Twitter) along with a program-specific website to disseminate program information and engage community members in our collaborative work.

The CO-CREATE project focuses on the San Ysidro community, a US/Mexico border region with predominantly Spanish-speaking, Latinx residents receiving care at a federally qualified health center.

CO-CREATE established its social media campaign in 3 stages:
1) developing a strategic plan of action (i.e., selecting appropriate platforms, identifying strategies to increase followers among our target populations of San Ysidro residents, health practitioners, and community organizations, and understanding the best methods for content promotion);
2) creating and disseminating content in line with CO-CREATE’s goals; 3) reviewing data analytics to further adapt and curate online content.

Three social media platforms were deployed as part of the CO-CREATE social media campaign. They were: 1) Instagram (@ucsdcocreateproject), 2) Twitter (@ucsdcocreate), and 3) a public-facing program website (co-create-radx.com). All were launched in January/February 2021. Based on analytics data, Instagram followers have increased by 21.9% between February 4 and March 5. To date, our Instagram page has amassed 111 followers, of which 67.3% identify as female and 67.8% are between the ages of 25-34. Instagram followers are most active on Instagram on Saturday evenings and top locations include San Diego, Chula Vista, Tijuana, which are neighboring regions that are the focus of CO-CREATE. In comparison, the CO-CREATE Twitter page has gained a total of nine followers. With a total of 3 tweets (posts), our average number of impressions (quantity of all the times the tweet has been seen) and engagements (when someone interacts with a tweet) is 63.3 and 5.3, respectively. Finally, the CO-CREATE website has accumulated 93 site sessions, 54 unique visitors, and 283 page views, with an average session duration of two minutes. The most popular page is the “team” page, meaning visitors are most interested in who is involved with the project.

Given the preliminary analysis of our social media outlets, Instagram seems to be the platform with the greatest engagement from our target audiences. Our team will continue to actively reassess our social media strategies to optimize dissemination and engagement. We expect to present rich data as information is gathered on a weekly basis from these three channels.