Social Media in Interventional Radiology: Strategies for Optimizing Twitter Engagement

Social media has earned its place in the interventional radiology community as a valuable tool for exchanging ideas, making professional connections, and disseminating information {1}. Given the innovative and rapidly changing nature of IR, the present study aims to identify strategies for maximizing Twitter engagement when discussing interventional radiology topics.

Materials and Methods: Approximately 3,000 tweets including the keywords “ablation” and “embolization” from January 2020-October 2022 were extracted using a Selenium browser and Beautiful Soup, a Python library for web scraping. Twitter username, hashtags, images, links, text content, and engagement statistics were collected for each tweet. The Student's t-test was utilized for all analyses.

Results: A total of 1,582 and 2,774 tweets included the keywords “embolization” and “ablation,” respectively. For all tweets, there was a statistically significant difference in engagement between tweets including images compared to those without images (p< 0.0001). For both keywords, there was a statistically significant difference in the level of engagement between tweets including and not including hashtags, with tweets that included hashtags having a greater mean number of likes (“embolization” p=0.001, “ablation” p< 0.0001). For both keywords, specific hashtags, such as hashtags pertaining to a particular journal, conference, or event, contributed strongly to engagement when compared to broad hashtags, such as “#IR” (“embolization” p< 0.0001, “ablation” p< 0.0001). For tweets with the “embolization” keyword, tweets sharing images experienced significantly higher engagement when compared to tweets sharing journal articles (p=0.0016). For tweets with the “ablation” keyword, there was a trend demonstrating the aforementioned phenomenon (p=0.048).

Conclusion:

Our preliminary results suggest that when tweeting, using specific hashtags for conferences and events may be a promising strategy for optimizing reach among the IR community. It may be beneficial for IR physicians and trainees to consider sharing more images, rather than links to journal articles, when discussing IR topics on Twitter.