Think about how and where participants are likely to find out about or discuss your topic: which kind of social media, for instance, do they use, and for what?

Digital technologies change rapidly, and researchers who are not themselves ‘digital natives’ need to be careful of making outdated assumptions about what apps or social media sites are used to communicate or to access health knowledge.

Twitter can be a useful source for crowd sourcing useful pointers to other research, researchers and potential conferences for dissemination.

If you use social media for research dissemination, consider whether it would be professional to keep separate accounts for personal use.

When using skype, conference calling, webinar, or other remote technologies for interviews and online focus groups, test the systems as much as possible before using them for data generation.