Social media optimization in medicine: A journal's perspective

Twitter, a social media platform, has emerged as an efficient tool for disseminating research findings among the medical community. In a 2014 Nature Social Networks survey, 85.4% of scientists were aware of Twitter.1 Among those, 49.1% used Twitter for “following other discussions on research‐related issues,” 47.3% for “posting content related to my work,” 40.3% for “discovering recommended research papers,” 39.7% for “commenting on research that is relevant to my field,” and 36.1% for “sharing links to authored content (eg, research papers, datasets).” Research about social media has also attained considerable popularity over the past decade. To date, based on PubMed, more than two thousand articles about Twitter (or using it for research) have been published, with more than one‐half produced in the past 3 years.