The severity of the rapidly-evolving COVID-19 pandemic warrants a creative, novel, and sustained approach to encourage public health protocol, keeping people safe and the economy open. With support from the Washington State Department of Commerce, Facebook, and Upswell partners, Restart partners was able to undertake three major social media campaigns to improve public health outcomes and more safely reopen the economy: Mask Adoption, Small Businesses, and Vaccine Adoption. 

Our campaigns and stakeholder analyses demonstrate the power that social media holds to effect positive social change and influence public health outcomes. This is significant as social media is concurrently being a vehicle for misinformation, threatening public health and costing lives. The primary objective of our research studies was to increase mask wearing, vaccine uptake, and awareness of safe business patronage through employing social media marketing techniques. 

In these reports, we demonstrate how social media marketing techniques, historically used to sell products, may be effective in encouraging people to adopt certain behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic that lead to better physical and mental health, and eventually to wide-scale social change and improved public health. Organizations may leverage the lessons learned from these studies to create campaigns to optimally achieve organizational goals.