Social Media in Radiology: Early Trends in Twitter Microblogging at Radiology's Largest International Meeting

Purpose

Twitter is a social media microblogging platform that allows rapid exchange of information between individuals. Despite its widespread acceptance and use at various other medical specialty meetings, there are no published data evaluating its use at radiology meetings. The purpose of this study is to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the use of Twitter as a microblogging platform at recent RSNA annual meetings.

Methods

Twitter activity meta-data tagged with official meeting hashtags #RSNA11 and #RSNA12 were collected and analyzed. Multiple metrics were evaluated, including daily and hourly Twitter activity, frequency of microblogging activity over time, characteristics of the 100 most active Twitter users at each meeting, characteristics of meeting-related tweets, and the geographic origin of meeting microbloggers.

Results

The use of Twitter microblogging increased by at least 30% by all identifiable meaningful metrics between the 2011 and 2012 RSNA annual meetings, including total tweets, tweets per day, activity of the most active microbloggers, and total number of microbloggers. Similar increases were observed in numbers of North American and international microbloggers.

Conclusion

Markedly increased use of the Twitter microblogging platform at recent RSNA annual meetings demonstrates the potential to leverage this technology to engage meeting attendees, improve scientific sessions, and promote improved collaboration at national radiology meetings.

Introduction

In recent years, various social media platforms have proliferated. In health care, Twitter (twitter.com, San Francisco, CA) has attracted the most attention. Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows users to share messages, information, questions, and links via short online posts (known as tweets) consisting of 140 characters or less. Twitter posts are shared with followers of the user who posts information. Those messages can subsequently be passed along to other Twitter users in an exponential (or “viral”) manner.

Recent evidence indicates that Twitter is no longer simply a medium for young people to share random idioms and status updates, but rather an increasingly accepted platform for thought-leaders, politicians, health care innovators, physicians, and educators to exchange information and ask questions 1, 2. Literature is now emerging regarding how physicians can use Twitter as a resource to learn and to engage patients in new, creative ways 3, 4, 5. A recent review of the use of social media in medical education concluded that social media is an emerging field of scholarship that warrants further investigation [6].

Researchers from various medical specialties have described the use of social media at their annual meetings 7, 8, 9, 10. To our knowledge, however, there is no published data regarding the use of microblogging technology by radiology meeting attendees. Thus, the purpose of this study is to assess and quantify the use of Twitter as a microblogging platform at radiology meetings, focusing on the specialty's largest international scientific gathering—the RSNA Annual Meeting.