#RadEd: How and Why to Use Twitter for Online Radiology Education

Purpose: As a digital presence rapidly becomes more important for educators, Twitter continues to emerge as a compelling source for publishing educational content. The social media platform has also evolved into a popular source for medical and radiology education. We examined how Twitter is used in the radiology sphere and introduce ways of optimizing Twitter for radiology education.

Methods: We evaluated our Twitter account (@ctisus), dedicated to radiology education and based in the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at Johns Hopkins Hospital, to learn from our users and evaluate how best to leverage the platform for radiology education. We culled analytics for all 1584 tweets we released from July to December 2019 and divided them into seven educational categories for analysis: case images; illustrations and infographics; slide images (taken from educational PowerPoints); case question videos; scroll-through videos; links to educational content on our website (lectures, quizzes, etc.) or online databases; and news links, including published journal articles and general medical and/or radiology news.

Results: News links (links to other news sites) received the fewest engagements (11.2), the fewest retweets (0.5), and the fewest likes (1.4). Scroll-through videos landed the highest average retweets (5.6), likes (21), and impressions (2290.7). Case images received the highest average engagements at 165.4 per tweet.

Conclusion: Our experience suggests that users prefer content to be directly available in a tweet and supports the notion that the radiology community is on Twitter to enhance radiology education. Twitter can be used to provide information in many ways: images, videos, text, links, or any combinations of these options. This allows educators to provide content for multiple different learning styles, further rendering Twitter a more accessible platform. As a valuable resource in radiology education, Twitter warrants even broader use in an era increasingly reliant on digital communication. By optimizing tweets for education, users can find their content helpful for radiology students and professionals alike.