28 - What's Trending in Texas?

Abstract: Social media continues to be an important tool to share information quickly to a wide audience for many public and private agencies, including public health departments. Public health programs, including those focused on mosquito prevention and control, use various media platforms because they provide easy situational awareness to the public regarding health alerts, mosquito surveillance and control schedules, and other mosquito control activities to a large percentage of the population in an expeditious way for little to no costs. Texas is home to 5 mosquito control districts, and many other mosquito prevention and control programs operating within local municipal and state departments such as public health, environmental health, emergency management, and others. The Texas Mosquito Control Association (TMCA) has compiled various strategies from programs across the state regarding their social media presence in their communities and how they leverage different platforms to get their messages to the individuals who need them. The TMCA hopes to follow the social media messaging framework of the American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA) by highlighting stories from across the state and providing potential material for programs to utilize that may not have dedicated personnel for social media communications.