To Tweet or Not to Tweet? A Look at Radiology Societies’ Use of Twitter

Abstract

Twitter is the most used social media platform by medical professionals and has become an effective way to disseminate ideas and information. To evaluate Twitter usage by some of the larger diagnostic radiology (DR) and interventional radiology (IR) societies. Data were collected from the publicly available Twitter analytics platform, Twitonomy™. Data collected included the number of followers, Twitter output, user engagement and changes of these parameters between January 2017 and January 2019. DR societies have the largest number of followers. The IR group increased its number of followers by 5139 (55%) compared with 10013 (18%) by the DR group during the period studied. In both years, the IR group posted more tweets/day compared with the DR group (6.6 vs. 4.7). Although user engagement increased for both IR and DR societies, the IR subgroup had a highly engaged user audience with a similar number of 'likes' to the DR group despite their larger Twitter following (DR 65500 vs. IR 14411 in 2019). The IR societies studied experienced comparable Twitter engagement to the larger DR societies. The societies with the smallest number of followers (BSIR and CIRSE) enjoyed the largest relative increase in followers over the study period. IR societies should be encouraged by these results to continue to publicize their work on social media and increase awareness of the specialty.