What’s our tweeting policy?

If you’re on Twitter, you might have noticed that we do like to tweet. A lot. We love the immediacy, informality and connectedness of Twitter.

Of course, as a non-profit social enterprise, we love its economics too – we don’t have a budget for advertising campaigns.

Because our tweets are often quotes from stories on Patient Opinion, we sometimes get asked what our “Twitter policy” is: why did we tweet that particular line from that particular story?

Usually, the question comes from the health/care provider the story is about. And (how can I put this without causing offence?) the question has never been prompted by a positive tweet about a provider.

So what is our Twitter policy? Well, we don’t have a formal policy, but we do have some broad principles:

• We tweet what interests us, and we hope will interest you
• We tweet especially from stories we think offer great learning to those who will listen
• We like to accentuate the positive, but we don’t eliminate the negative
• We aim to reflect the very broad mix of experiences we receive

To expand on this, we receive many more stories than we can possibly tweet, so we have to select some and not others. We select stories pretty much at random. Because more of the feedback we receive tends to be positive than negative, our tweets also tend to be more positive than negative.

Because a quote in a tweet must be short, but the story may be long, it is often impossible for the quote to “represent” the whole story. So we always include a link to the story, so you can read it all for yourself. The quote we tweet will be selected to both stand on its own, and to encourage you to follow the link.

Sometimes, health/care providers think we deliberately look for negative things to tweet about them. We don’t do that.

Sometimes, patients think we deliberately tweet only positive things to present a false impression of a service. We don’t do that either.

We think the stories patients and carers tell on Patient Opinion are so often rich, insightful, moving, full of learning opportunities. We wish we could tweet even more of them.

We’d tweet them all if we could – but that might be a bit more tweeting than you, or we, could cope with.