Promoting Your Research or Clinical Practice on Social Media

Best practices from UH Marketing leaders

UH Clinical Update | May 2022

Social media is a great way to promote your research or clinical practice. If you have one for this purpose, here are some best practices:

• Be familiar with guidelines set in the UH social media policy and UH Code of Conduct.
• Tag University Hospitals when promoting research, innovation or news from your work:
  • Twitter @UHhospitals
  • Facebook @UniversityHospitals
  • Instagram @uhhospitals_cle
• Logos for the system, departments and institutes are available at the UH Brand Center.
• Make hashtags relevant and specific to improve search.
• Establish a regular posting cadence. Even if just one post per week, your posts will appear higher in audience timelines if your channel is consistently active.
• Engage with relevant/appropriate content posted by colleagues (such as liking, commenting, sharing, etc.). By interacting with other individuals/channels, you can help raise awareness of and drive engagement for your own channel.
• Most major social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) provide free analytics. Use these insights to see what types of content drive the most engagement for your channel. These learnings can help guide your posting strategy.
• Take a look at research institutes or clinical practices with significant social media followings. What are they doing to drive success? How frequently are they posting – and what are they posting about that seems to earn engagement? Consider if any similar approaches could benefit your own channel.  
• Friendly reminder: Before using any patient information, including (but not limited to) names, images, stories, etc., a media release form needs to be physically signed by the corresponding patient and kept on file. These can also be found in the UH Brand Center.