6C.005 Using social media for injury prevention: the experience of the SafeTea campaign

Background Burns from hot drinks are common and preventable amongst children under 5 years. Methods The 3-month SafeTea campaign aimed to prevent hot drink scalds and improve burns first aid using social media, and a website hosting downloadable resources and videos. Key messages were disseminated on Twitter, Facebook and MumsNet to parents/caregivers. Evaluation included social media metrics, Google Analytics, quantitative and qualitative results from a sample survey of 500 professionals who received hard copies of SafeTea resources on request (posters, fliers, fridge magnets, stickers and activity packs). Results SafeTea benefited from being launched on National Burns Awareness Day 2019, and from the two ‘case studies’ that attracted media interest. of an estimated 9,550 Facebook users per day, 84% were women between 25 and 44 years old. A scald prevention video was viewed 154,000 times and the first aid video 245,000 times. SafeTea impressions on Twitter totalled 196,400, with an average engagement rate of 0.78%. 19,059 unique webpages were viewed, and the majority of social media referrals to the website (96.5%) originated from Facebook. Qualitative feedback from parents relating to the two campaign videos was very positive, and 87% professionals surveyed rated the campaign materials as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. Conclusion Social media is an effective way to deliver injury prevention to parents and childcare professionals. Learning Outcomes Linking burn prevention messages to first aid advice was effective. Burns awareness day gave SafeTea invaluable publicity and boosted Facebook and Twitter engagement. Social media analytics suggested that the campaign could have been shorter.