Instagram and Clinical Infectious Diseases

TO THE EDITOR—We read the article by Goff et al [1] with great interest regarding the relevance of social media (SM) platform Twitter to infectious diseases clinicians. We concur with the authors regarding the relevance of SM tools to infectious diseases practice and wish to call attention to the photograph-based SM platform, Instagram, as an emerging site of interest. Instagram is a free SM platform launched in October of 2010 that has been a part of Facebook, Inc., since April 2012 [2]. The platform reports a community of 300 million users as of December 2014. Each day users from around the world (>70% are outside the US) register >2.5 billion “likes” and share >70 million photos. Data from an American survey in September 2014 indicate 26% of online adults use Instagram, and half of Internet users age 18 to 29 years of age use Instagram [3]. Beyond the large number of engaged adults (particularly young adults), it is notable that about half of all Instagram users access the site at least once daily. Posts on Instagram are shared as an image, which may be paired with a text of up to 2200 characters, including up to 30 hashtags. Similar to Twitter, Instagram does not require users to mutually connect; users may listen (view posts) or talk (share content) and users may “like” posts (similar to a “favorite” on Twitter). Privacy settings may be modified to allow open access to posted content (even persons without an Instagram account) or access only to those granted permission. Once a user elects to “follow” another’s account, that account’s posts will appear in the user’s feed (similar to the news feed of Facebook or the home stream of Twitter). An Instagram account can be linked to other SM accounts (eg, Twitter, Facebook) to enable simultaneous crosspublishing of Instagram posts, thus extending the reach of Instagram content to non-Instagram users. This is particularly relevant for connecting with themost commonly used SM platform, Facebook [3]. SM is identified as an emerging field of research in medical education [4]; however, for Instagram a dearth of literature and policy statements exist describing its role in this regard. One publication from the field of dermatology recognizes Instagram as a unique mechanism for reaching younger demographic populations (particular females), noting its potential to provide educational content [5]. Although hard data are lacking, numerous Instagram profiles exist today that are relevant to healthcare and infectious diseases. Table 1 provides a nonexhaustive list of Instagram accounts that may be of interest to the infectious diseases community. With its current user demographics, growing popularity and frequent user engagement, Instagram has great potential to be utilized as a mechanism for raising awareness, establishing inter-professional collaborations, and providing education to (1) future healthcare providers, (2) current healthcare providers, and (3) the general public. In this era of technological advancement and antimicrobial resistance we encourage infectious diseases clinicians to not only engage on SM platforms but also diversify their engagement.