COVID-19 COMMUNICATION TOOLKIT

Protecting Community Health:

To promote COVID-19 African American Education and Outreach

Social Media Toolkits

Public health education and guidance are a critical part of navigating the uncertainty of the threats we are faced with dealing with the triple threat of COVID-19, RSV, and influenza.

Please feel free to use the tools in this communications toolkit to help educate your community and keep its members safe.

  • Social media graphics, infographics and messaging you can use to help educate your community.

Table of Contents

The Toolkits
Best Practices
Key Resources
New Messaging
Workshop

Introduction

Below, you will find a set of expertly-curated messages about the importance of community health and COVID-19 vaccinations and set of hand illustrated graphics. Each message is accompanied by a suggested graphic, but feel free to pair any graphic with any message. It’s perfectly fine to mix and match graphics and messaging to your organization’s needs. All of the graphics for all of the posts are stored in this folder.

To create a social media post, save the image by clicking on the graphic link and copy and paste the messaging into your selected social media scheduling platform.

Buffer allows you to make multiple versions of the same message for each social media platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

Below the toolkts you will find a variety of best practices including ideal social media platforms to use.

The Toolkits

Faith-Based Toolkit
General Toolkit
Pediatric Toolkit
Booster Toolkit
Graphics

Social Media Best Practices

These illustrated graphics and their accompanying messages were designed with the health of the community in mind. They can be posted on any social media platform, as all social platforms work well with square media.

To effectively communicate your message, we encourage you to optimize your posting power. Each social media platform has a different set of expectations to reach the largest audience and generate the most engagement.

Post Strategy

Facebook
Facebook is a great place to share community-based messages and reach your audience. To generate the most reach and engagement, post on Tuesday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. local time. It’s recommended to post no more than two times per day on Facebook. Hashtags are a great way to link your messages to other social media content. It is recommended that your organization uses no more than two hashtags per post for best reach

Instagram
Instagram is perfect for sharing eye-catching and emotionally-driven content. Post in the middle of the week between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. for best results. Posting once a day is sufficient. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post. However, Instagram performs best with approximately 10 hashtags. It’s helpful to keep an evergreen list of relevant hashtags to use in your posts.

Twitter
With more than 237 million active accounts, Twitter is a powerful social media platform to share compact, curated content. Twitter is the only social media platform that has a character limit. Tweets can be up to 280 characters in length, including spaces. A carefully crafted tweet with the right message can easily reach thousands of people. Tweeting once or twice a day is sufficient. Tweets with no more than two hashtags perform the best. It’s important to be as efficient as possible with hashtags and the character limit.

WhatsApp
WhatsApp is the name of a mobile messaging app for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone or for Mac or Windows PCs. With this tool, you can Rapidly spread information and critical messages among members, encourage members to share and “forward” information to relatives and friends, and share broadcast messages to a community. Message up to 256 phone contacts.

Batch Scheduling

One of the most effective ways to consistently reach your audience is to schedule content as much as you can. Scheduling takes the stress out of knowing when messages are going to be published.

Having a social media calendar also means that you can link your content to any upcoming observances or holidays to increase reach. By scheduling posts ahead of time, you are ensuring that the audience experiences the content on a consistent basis. There are many social media scheduling tools available. Buffer is one of the most popular social media scheduling tools.

Key Resources

Vaccines.gov
Vaccines.gov is a one-stop shop for all vaccination information. It’s a rich, easy to navigate website with information about vaccine safety and COVID-19 guidelines. Information on this site can easily be incorporated into the messages of this toolkit.

Find COVID Vaccines
This interactive tool from the We Can Do This Initiative — a collaboration of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Boston Children’s Hospital — allows its users to find where they can get COVID-19 and flu vaccine for themselves or their children.

Stay Up to Date with Vaccine Boosters
This short quiz tool from the CDC gives its users guidance on vaccine boosters for themselves and their children. It’s a quick way to know if someone needs to schedule an appointment to a vaccine booster. Interested parties can also use their hotline (1-800-232-0233) to find out where vaccines are available in their area.

Recover COVID
RECOVER research aims to understand how people recover from a COVID infection, and why some people do not fully recover and develop Long COVID or PASC (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2). Long COVID is when people have symptoms weeks or months after they first had COVID.

Updated Messaging to Fight Covid-19

Key Messages

  • COVID-19 is still a threat to our community
  • New COVID-19 strains are still appearing so you can expect information and recommendations to update season to season.
  • Practice preventive measures to protect your family and community
  • Prevent severe illness with COVID vaccine/booster
  • Protect your children with pediatric COVID vaccine

Promoting Vaccine Confidence

  • The COVID-19 vaccines protect you against severe illness from all variants.
  • The COVID-19 vaccine and booster are FREE.
  • It is normal to get side effects from the vaccine, it means your body is building protection.
  • Booster shots reinforce vaccine protection against becoming very ill from COVID-19.
  • The benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the potential risks.

Toolkit Workshop