2023 American Academy of Neurology Abstract Website

Objective:

Analyze a Twitter-Based Educational Initiative for a Neurocritical Fellowship

Background:

“Tweetorials” are online tutorials published on Twitter. This style of microteaching is an innovative way to provide free, globally accessible online medication education. For trainees, authoring a Tweetorial is a novel way to distill specialized knowledge and reach a large academic audience while also receiving immediate feedback. Authoring a Tweetorial may be a way for trainees to network and engage in longitudinal conversations within the medical community. We present analytic data about the impact of our fellowship program’s Twitter teaching initiative.

Design/Methods:

The Twitter education project #EmoryNCCTweetorials was announced in the Summer of 2021 as optional participation for the neurocritical care fellows. Data was collected regarding the number of participating fellows and number of Tweetorials. An AI-driven platform for Twitter analytics, “Tweepsmap ®,” was utilized to analyze the number of tweets, impact, and various types of engagement from July 1, 2021 to September 28, 2022. Participants were surveyed about their opinions of writing Tweetorials and what they learned.

Results:

In a fifteen-month period, five of seven fellows participated in the initiative. Twenty-two Tweetorials were created by fellows, which in total garnered over 2.5 million impressions (cumulative number of views). Together the Tweetorials were retweeted (shared) over a thousand times and received nearly five thousand likes. The Tweetorials were viewed in 62 countries and most engagement was from healthcare-associated accounts (73.1%) with the remainder being characterized as students, education, science and technology and others. The fellows rated the experience positively.

Conclusions:

Social media-based educational initiatives are innovative strategies for teaching neurocritical care topics and may promote trainee engagement in the neurology community and have far-reaching networking effects. Further analyses are needed to investigate longitudinal participation, information retention and value-added aspects of social media education for trainees.