Twitter and Radiology: Everything You Wanted to Know About #RadTwitter But Were Afraid to Ask

Twitter is one of the world's leading social media platforms, and the most popular such forum for medical professionals. We previously examined how Twitter is used in radiology and suggested methods of optimizing Twitter for radiology education. Here we address those in the radiology community who have not yet embraced Twitter or those who have just begun, offering insights or hacks to make the reader more comfortable with initiating or better leveraging a Twitter account to enhance their radiology work lives.

We analyzed our Twitter account (@ctisus), dedicated to radiology education and based in the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at Johns Hopkins Hospital, to ascertain how we could best use the platform for radiology education. We also used the healthcare social media monitoring website Symplur to track the use of 7 radiology-related hashtags from March 6 to April 4, 2021.

Over the 30-day period, we found that #radiology was used 12,311 times; #RadRes (radiology residents) was used 7864 times; #IRad (interventional radiology) was used 6176 times; #FOAMrad (free and open access radiology education) was used 3661 times; #medicalimaging was used 3317 times; #RadTwitter (radiology Twitter) was used 942 times; and #RadEd (radiology education) was used 697 times. This collection of 7 keywords is among the most popularly used by the radiology community.

Our experience suggests that the radiology community is on Twitter to enhance radiology education. Twitter may seem to be a daunting field of misinformation, but radiologists as well as radiology fellows and residents worldwide have found it to be a platform rich with information and opportunity. Twitter allows information and media to be sent instantly throughout the world. We encourage those in the radiology world not yet or barely using Twitter to get started or more involved in this useful and popular social media platform.