Social media

Health messages reach the public through social media platforms, where researchers post about their findings and hospitals, associations and pharmaceutical companies run channels of their own, and this branch covers writing for them. It divides along the part of that work a reader is doing: understanding what social media has changed in health communication, writing a post about a piece of research, running a healthcare organisation's channels as a programme, reading the measured evidence on hospitals' use of them, or running a pharmaceutical company's channels under the industry codes. It leaves a writer's own professional presence on the networks to online presence, the advertisement that recruits trial participants to recruiting trial participants online, patient posts read as evidence of a medicine's safety to patient reports in social media as safety evidence, making posts usable by every reader to making web and social media content accessible, and what an organisation says on any channel when something has gone wrong in public to crisis communications.

• Health communication on social media — social media defined broadly as interactive electronic communication, what it changed in how health messages pass between their sources and their audiences, a public informed online and engaged offline, the texting services, shared visit notes and peer networks that help patients and caregivers, what campaigns on it and everyday use of it do to health, and the CDC's guide to writing health messages for it
• Social media posts about research — turning a publication into a short post that has to earn its reader in the first line: the platform and reader, the hook and how much it gives away, the post a journal asks for at submission with its hashtags, central illustration and threads, and evidence strength in words a lay reader will not misread
• Social media for a healthcare organisation — running a hospital, health system or association's channels as a programme: what holds it back, the purposes it serves, policy and patient privacy, growing it out of existing practice, a changing landscape and AI tools, planning and measuring, one framework across channels tailored to each platform, staffing and training, and the writer's shift into managing
• What the evidence shows about hospitals on social media — how far hospitals have adopted it across countries and hospital types, what consumers say it changes in their health decisions, what the largest US hospitals and medical schools post, and which posts draw engagement and whom they miss
• Social media for a pharmaceutical company — a regulated company's channels: the industry codes, guidelines written where no regulator has issued any, monitoring and measuring, connecting with patients, influencer marketing and its disclosure, clinical trials and rare diseases, and what physicians discuss online