Blogging for Health Organizations!

Social Media has evolved and expanded drastically over the years with many forms being utilized by people, companies and even health organizations. Social media allows people to connect with one another and distribute all sorts of information with the world.

Health professionals and health organizations can use Blogger to share information or posts about what they are currently doing in the community, introducing different ideas and volunteers and share information and findings through out their blog. Specifically, Blogger allows users to embed different types of media like photos and videos. If the organization recently assisted in relief efforts in a country and desired to blog about it, they could include photos of what they did to make the blog more appealing to readers. Blogger is an archive of posts so as something new is posted, the previous posts is put under the new one. Therefore readers can still access older posts if the user makes them available to read.

Blogging Tips:

*Define your goal(s):

·      What is the purpose?

·      What will you write about?

·      Who is the target audience?

- Not having a set goal or working towards accomplishing something, you may eventually fail.

*Being consistent:

·      Information is relative to the overall blog topic

·      Posts are shared in a relative similar time frame.

·      Once a week? Once a month? Once a day? – You decide and stick with it!

- If your blog is about providing water to a village in the Galapagos Islands, you should not be posting information about the new iPhone.

*Spell Check and Grammar:

·      Write well

·      Use spell check

·      Proper grammar is important

·      Proofread

­- If blog posts are unorganized, inconsistent, full of grammar and spelling errors, the credibility as a health organization/professional will decrease.

This website is a great resource to get you and your health organization jump-started on building a blog! http://goo.gl/OwSPLc

United States Department of Agriculture

The USDA is a great example of an organization utilizing blogging. They have successfully created a header with their organization logo, provided tabs to access different pages, a sidebar with different topics they’ve posted about as well as a body with the most recent postings. The USDA has even included links to their other social media sites. When building up a brand or company on social media, it is crucial to link every social media account with one another because not only does it increase traffic by allowing visitors to quickly click to your other sites, but it also keeps them from having to go back to a search engine to find more information about yourself or organization.

Take a look here to get a better understanding of the USDA’s blog!

http://goo.gl/tPCIes