Tweetorials as a novel way to increase audience engagement and promote academic activities

Introduction
Social media (SoMe) based medical education has rapidly evolved and continues to revolutionise the dissemination of medical information. The International Society of Nephrology (ISN) has kept abreast with these innovations using many tools including Twitter, to globally engage SoMe users and promote nephrology education through its @ISNeducation SoMe team. As part of this initiative the ISN embraced tweetorials, as a novel means to promote ISN webinars in Feb 2021. Tweetorials are a “collection of threaded tweets aimed at teaching users who engage with them”and have been increasingly popular amongst the SoMe community.
Methods
A subteam of 15 nephrologists from around the world who are part of the @ISNeducation team created tweetorials prospectively focused on topics of upcoming ISN webinars or other ISN events. The tweetorial was shared from @ISNeducation twitter handle a few days before the event. We analysed the impact of @ISNeducation tweetorials by measuring user access and engagement by metrics such as number of impressions (number of times a user was served the first Tweet of the tweetorial in their timeline or search results); detail expands (No. of clicks on the first tweet to view more details); number of engagements (total number of times a user interacted with a Tweet); number of clicks anywhere on the Tweet (including Retweets, replies, follows, likes, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, profile photo, or Tweet expansion); number of likes (times a user liked the first tweet of the tweetorial); number of retweets (number of times readers re-posted the tweetorial on their timeline to their followers); number of profile clicks (times users clicked on the @ISNeducation twitter handle from the tweetorial or profile photo or of the twitter handle of the user sharing the tweetorial). The descriptive data is presented in numbers and totals, with graphs made using Microsoft Excel.
Results
A total of 7 tweetorials were posted by the team between February to August, 2021, of which data for analysis was available for 6 tweetorials. Cumulatively the tweetorials had 136,429 impressions on twitter, which lead to 5,746 total engagements from users, 3,479 detail expands, 400 likes, 329 total retweets and 248 times users clicked on the either the @ISNeducation username or alternate twitter handle from which the tweetorial was shared (Figure 1). The impact of each individual tweetorial varied, but trended towards increased impressions and user engagements over time (Figure 2). The average impressions and user engagement was 22,738 and 957 times per tweetorial respectively. The most popular tweetorial was the latest one, released in August 2021 on Non infectious complications of peritoneal dialysis which had 47,177 impressions, 3,471 engagements and over 153 likes. Tweetorials are more popular with users when compared with other ISN SoMe activites (Figure 3).
Conclusions
The ISN has been a pioneer in nephrology education by evolving with the times. @ISNeducation has successfully employed and engaged users by adopting tweetorials as a novel means of SoMe based nephrology education. Our data supports the idea that tweetorials not only educate users on complex information by logical and sequential threads, but also serve as a valuable tool for supporting and promoting other educational offerings such as lectures/webinars and similar society activities.
No conflict of interest