What do you think of when you think of social media? Do you think of lost productivity due to “playing on smart phones”? Or do you think about access to people, articles, concepts, and relationships that you might not have otherwise encountered or may have encountered less frequently? I suggest that in a time of great uncertainty in health care and in academic medicine, access to information and relationships is a critical tool. Social media can be a vehicle to access material that you might not otherwise encounter in your daily routine.
Using Twitter as an example, I hope to show you that interactions using social media can bring value to you, your department, and your profession. First, I want to make sure we all speak the same language. There are many social media platforms. Some share photos (eg, Flickr, Picasa); others share video (eg, YouTube). Twitter is a microblog and is used for sharing short messages. How short? One hundred and forty characters. Can you say anything meaningful in 140 characters? Yes, but not always in complete sentences with perfect grammar. A message sent out through Twitter is called a tweet and often consists of abbreviations. Where do tweets come from? Think of Twitter as a television and you choose the channels you want to watch and when you want to watch them. When you follow people or organizations on Twitter, their tweets are collected in a data stream called timeline. If you see a tweet that you want to share, you can retweet to people who are following you on Twitter.
If you had a Twitter account, you could follow @RadiologyACR or @DrGMcGinty (the Chair of the ACR Economics Commission), to get timely updates on health policy and economic issues in radiology. Or if you were interested in a more broad view of health policy, you could follow @CMSGov or @OIGatHHS, which are the Twitter feeds from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the Inspector General, respectively. If you were not interested in health policy but were interested in research funding you might want to follow @PCORI, the account from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
You might also encounter Twitter at our national and international radiology conferences. The radiology literature shows that the use of social media has been increasing at our professional meetings . Many radiology conferences now have a conference hashtag for attendees to use when tweeting (eg, #AUR14, #RSNA14). In addition to brief messages announcing lectures, demonstrations, or other activities, a tweet can direct you to a multimedia presentation. Although Twitter messages must be less than 140 characters, software is available to reduce the length of a Web site’s address. Thus, tweets from radiology conferences may contain a shortened Web site address which in turn will take you to a YouTube video, a photo, or a document.
One advantage of conference hashtags is you do not need to be at the conference to follow a conference hashtag on Twitter. Anyone who has access to twitter can follow the conference hashtag (and hence the conference) from anywhere. People who are not at the conference can interact with participants at the conference creating a virtual dialog.
Some researchers tweet links to their publications, whereas others use social media as a virtual seminar to discuss their research with people who are geographically diverse or may even be from different professions or points of view. Social media activity linked to journal articles is associated with increased web views of the associated articles .
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References
1. Hawkins C.M., Duszak R., Rawson J.V.: Social media in radiology: early trends in Twitter microblogging at radiology’s largest international meeting. Journal of American College of Radiology 2014; 11: pp. 387-390.
2. The impact of social media on readership of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Hawkins CM, Hillman, BJ, Carlos RC, Rawson JV, Haines, R, Duszak, R, Accepted for publication in Journal of American College of Radiology