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‘Tweet-athon’ Stamps out Stigma for Social Media Week

Blog, News | No Comments 28th February 2012

Social Media Week 2012 took place from 13-17 February, reflecting the global impact of social media in driving social, economical and cultural change. To mark the occasion, the ‘Sticks and Stones’ campaign team held a ‘tweet-athon’ throughout the week via their @istampoutstigma Twitter page, posting a succession of planned tweets to their followers between Monday and Friday.

Social media played a key role in the success of the 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s ‘Sticks and Stones’ campaign, which aims to stamp out the stigma surrounding mental ill-health and learning disabilities. Social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter, have allowed the Trust to engage with a wide audience of people to effectively communicate its campaign message.

Twitter, which allows users to post 140 character messages – known as tweets – to an audience of followers, helped to boost the number of pledges to the campaign by over 5000 in May 2010, when Stephen Fry tweeted his support to ‘Sticks and Stones’. He posted a message, encouraging his followers to sign up to the campaign, pledging not to use words that are hurtful or offensive to describe people with mental ill-health and learning disabilities. This rapid increase in support shows just how powerful social media can be in reaching a wide audience with a message.

By tweeting several times a day during Social Media Week, the ‘tweet-athon’ saw the number of followers on the @istampoutstigma page grow by 86 between Monday and Friday, and the account received over 100 re-tweets during the course of the week, meaning the ‘Sticks and Stones’ campaign values were being shared to an even wider audience across the site. The team tweeted thought-provoking content and interesting statistics, engaging with their followers by encouraging them to get involved in debates around mental health and learning disability stigma. By the end of the week, 24 people were engaged in conversations on Twitter about @istampoutstigma.

NHS North West, the Strategic Health Authority for the whole of the North West region, also helped to promote the ‘Sticks and Stones’ campaign throughout the week by re-tweeting the @istampoutstigma page’s tweets on their own Twitter page. To date, the ‘Sticks and Stones’ campaign Twitter account has 1,632 followers – and counting! You can visit the ‘Sticks and Stones’ campaign’s Twitter page at: www.twitter.com/istampoutstigma.

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