21 May 2018
Twitter for healthcare professionals: what you should know
Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool for healthcare professionals who want to use social media in a professional capacity. Get some tips and tricks here.
Twitter can seem daunting to first-time users, but it is actually a simple tool that allows you to stay up to date about research and hot topics in your field of medical expertise. It is possible to use your Twitter account only to listen, and to start participating only when you feel truly comfortable with doing so. The character limit has been increased to 280 characters, which means that it is easier to create a tweet.
What is a hashtag?
A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and is used to identify messages on a specific topic. Hashtags are very useful to allow you to follow conversation threads around specific topics, for example a disease type. All medical conferences now also use hashtags to engage Twitter users to tweet about what they have learnt and about their congress experience in general.
Which hashtags are of interest to healthcare professionals?
Symlur, a healthcare social media analytics provider, have created a Cardiology Ontology which provides a list of hashtags used around the world to communicate on different topics: view Symplur’s Cardiology Ontology
Hashtags of particular interest to interventional cardiologists are amongst others:
- #STEMI ST elevation MI
- #NSTEMI Non-ST elevation MI
- #cvVHD Valvular Heart Disease
- #RadialFirstRadial
- #Stroke Stroke
- #TAVI Transcutaneous Aortic Valve Implantation
- #TAVR Transcutaneous Aortic Valve Replacement
- #Heartfailure Heart failure
- #CardioOnc Cardio-oncology
- #cvACS Acute Coronary Syndrome
- #cvCABG Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting
- #cvCHF Congestive Heart Failure
- #AFib Atrial Fibrillation
- #LVAD Left Ventricular Assist Device
- #MitraClip MitraClip
Other hashtags often used by Cardiologists are: #CardioTwitter, #CardioEd, #Twitterati
The anatomy of a tweet
A typical tweet can contain several elements. It can be a simple phrase, but to increase engagement, it's a good idea to include a hashtag, a link, an image and a mention. To find someone's Twitter handle, search for the person's or organisation's name on the web, and add Twitter to the search phrase, for example: "PCRonline Twitter".
1. #hashtags | 2. @people | 3. @society | 4. Image |
Practical tips for Increasing visibility on Twitter :
- Asking people to retweet (RT)
- Tweets with images get twice as many retweets as those without
- 18% more engagement for accounts that respond than those that don’t
- Shorter tweets get more engagement than longer ones
- Links receive more retweets than tweets without links
- Use hashtags to increase engagement