El Rincon del Dr. KakaWate

A recent article was published in Circulation “A Randomized Trial of Social Media from Circulation” that concluded “A social media strategy for a cardiovascular journal did not increase the number of times an article was viewed”. Social Media use involved postings on the journal’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Social Media is not about just posting, sharing and retweeting. There are many variables that play an important role on how social media would impact a particular outcome. 1) Who is doing it? 2) How many followers the individual have and what type of followers are they. 3) Timing is key, there are studies out there showing when is the correct time to use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress in order to get the most traffic. 4) In addition, articles should not only be available to physicians. We live in an empowering world, with intelligent patients that also want to learn about medical advances and many are more than fit to understand our articles even without a medical degree, this I guarantee. Therefore cost is definitely an issue and this is the reason why sometimes the summaries made in blogs regarding a particular article get thousands of more views than the original content.

Social Media is not just about posting, there is truly an interesting art behind it. From eloquent titles to intriguing eye captivating graphics. An fantastic platform that not many physicians are aware of is Reddit. This is a precious resource if you know how to use it properly but watch out there are also dark corners involved. In reddit just choose your particular field of interest (called a subreddit) and dig in. The Subreddit SCIENCE is particulary interesting, full of intelligent individuals who offer amazing knowledge in their discussions. Yes, also a lot of trolls but an interesting “world” nevertheless.

My point? Well my point is that Social Media does affect number of views and even though I congratulate the authors efforts I do not necessarily agree with them . Below you have an example of an article I was following in http://reddit.com/r/science. In the morning and then 6 hours later. It was coincidentally an article AHAJournals “Adherence to a Mediterranean Diet and Prediction of Incident Stroke”

Just from reddit, this article got at least 133 views (people can upvote and downvote and article, number goes up and down depending on this). Now look 6 hours later how many people actually LIKED the post 3123. This means that thanks to reddit this article got at least 3123 views of which some of this individuals went to share the article in their own personal social networks.

This is just one example of how Social Media DOES impact how our findings and articles get seen.