Examining Twitter use in interventional radiology: A comparison with cardiology and orthopedic surgery

Objectives: The objectives of the study were to characterize the similarities and differences in amount and quality of user engagement on Twitter between interventional radiology (IR), cardiology, and orthopedic surgery and identify trends in Twitter use by the IR community. Material and Methods: General specialty hashtags and groups of users were identified for IR, cardiology, and orthopedic surgery and used for stratified searches of tweets using Symplur Hashtag Finder over a 5-year period. Analytics for total statistics, associated hashtags, common words, total Twitter activity, and a network analysis were obtained for predefined user groups. Results: A total of 278,866 IR, 420,021 cardiology, and 106,684 orthopedic surgery tweets were analyzed. IR had the highest percentage of retweets, media files, mentions, and replies. Between physicians, IR had fewer users than cardiology and orthopedic surgery but a greater percentage of users tweeting at higher volumes compared to cardiology and orthopedic surgery. IR had greater average interactions per user than cardiology and orthopedic surgery, but IR overall had a lower percentage of tweets by organizations. Conclusion: Social media activity in IR demonstrates substantial interaction and engagement despite having less users than cardiology and orthopedic surgery. Most of this activity was noted to be between IR physicians, while the other two specialties had more interaction with users unrelated to the medical field. These data provide insight into the nature of Twitter users within IR; being aware of these results could motivate users to increase their own interactions with patients and members of the public sphere.