P3B170: How to Be a #tweetiatrician: Content Fundamentals

Background: Twitter has become one of the most widely utilized social media platform, permitting a new frontier of personal and professional online engagement. Pediatrician advocates have taken advantage of the platform and organized on Twitter around the hashtag, #tweetiatrician, forming interdisciplinary advocacy networks. However, the ways in which these “tweetiatricians” use Twitter, the types of tweets they share, the content of their tweets, and how well they are able to build an online following has not been qualified.

Methods: Twitter data from all users with #tweetiatrician in their bio as of April 2022 was exported directly from Twitter, n = 163. Posts (tweets) that were created between July 17, 2021 and July 17, 2022 were defined as either retweets, quote tweets, or original tweets, and metrics about those posts were obtained. The ten posts with the highest engagement from each tweet type were then manually analyzed and categorized by 2 research assistants based on the nature of the content using a unique set of coding rules. These categories included personal, healthcare, academia, pediatric advocacy, other advocacy, news/pop culture, and unknown. Multivariate regressions were run for each tweet type to correlate the percentage with various account metrics, using ANOVA tests to evaluate for significance.

Results: A total of 152 accounts were analyzed; 11 accounts excluded due to lack of account access or tweets. Accounts had an average of 763.1±479.2 tweets in the year data was pulled, consisting of 233.6±449.6 retweets (34.4%), 59.6±86.7 quoted tweets (9.1%), and 469.9±692.4 original tweets (56.5%). An increased number of followers significantly correlated with an increased proportion of retweets relating to healthcare (β = 280.6 followers per % increase, p = 0.049) and original tweets relating to personal topics (β = 341.1 followers per % increase, p = 0.017). An increased number of total favorites significantly correlated with increased proportion of retweets relating to non-pediatrics related advocacy (β = 2,651.9 favorites per % increase, p < 0.001) and quote tweets about news/pop culture (β = 3,397.9 favorites per % increase, p = 0.004). Increased total favorites also correlated significantly with increased original tweets about healthcare (β = 919.2 favorites per % increase, p = 0.047) and non-pediatrics advocacy (β = 1,447.9 favorites per % increase, p = 0.030).

Conclusion: Despite sharing a focus on pediatric advocacy, tweetiatricians share content relating to a wide variety of topics outside the field of healthcare. Their online activity suggests Twitter users can significantly increase their following by retweeting healthcare-related content and posting original tweets that pertain to the user's personal life. Users may increase the number of favorites their tweets receive by retweeting posts about news/pop culture and non-pediatrics advocacy, quoting posts about news/pop culture, and posting original content about healthcare and non-pediatrics advocacy.