My name is Joey Lindsey. I'm one of the neurosurgery residents at the University of Michigan. Today I'm going to be talking about the Journal of Neurosurgery's experience in utilizing a specialized social media team to increase their online impact and presence. As many of you know, social media use continues to gain momentum in both the public and academic spheres. Almost three-quarters of the public uses some form of social media throughout their day-to-day lives. Even within academics, the creation of the altmetric score in 2010 is evidence of the increasingly important role of social media in the dissemination of research. As such, the Journal of Neurosurgery publishing group decided to create a dedicated social media team to increase and improve their digital outreach. The purpose of this study was to assess whether the creation of that social media team ended up increasing the impact of the Journal of Neurosurgery within the online spheres. For this study, we took all metrics from both Twitter and Facebook between February of 2015 and February of 2019. Our social media team was created on November 1st, 2016. All the metrics were analyzed both before and after the implementation of the social media team, and we looked both at specific hashtags that were used, the day of the week that the post was sent out, and the timing of the post. For Twitter, we found that before the creation of a social media team, there's only about 8.1 tweets per month going out. However, after, over 100 tweets per month were sent out. And as you can see by the table, in impressions, engagements, retweets, likes, profile clicks, and URL clicks, there is a significant increase in the number after the creation of a social media team. As could be expected, posts that had illustrations or videos that were visually engaging did significantly better than posts that just had tables or charts. For Twitter, posts that were sent out over the weekend compared to the weekday had significantly more retweets, likes, and URL clicks. Facebook showed a very similar picture. 2.3 posts per month before a social media team, 81.5 posts per month after the creation of a social media team. In both impressions, engagements, and then also in total reach, the number of people that were reached by each post, there are significant increases after the creation of a social media team. Similar to Twitter, those posts that were sent out on a weekend compared to a weekday had significantly more impressions, and they reached a significantly larger group of people. Overall, metrics were significantly increased after the institution of a social media team for the journal of neurosurgery. There was increased engagement for both Twitter and Facebook on weekend posts compared to weekdays, likely demonstrating the increase in amount of time that a neurosurgeon has to spend on these type of posts on a weekend compared to a weekday. However, there wasn't any significant difference in engagement based on the time of day that the post was sent out. One of the other benefits of a dedicated social media team is their ability to implement specific tools to increase the popularity and disseminate articles. One such example is the picture of the visual abstract on the right, effective partnerships, us with the neurosurgical atlas, and then the ability to continue to innovate online and virtual education, which is needed in continually evolving social media world. Now, this is just a single journal's experience. Additionally, we only looked at Twitter and Facebook. Many journals utilize Instagram as well, but we only examined our results on Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, the exact relationship between these measures of engagement and traditional bibliometric data is still unclear and something that needs to be examined in further studies. And lastly, the time zones and international viewership of JNS muddied the waters for any results that we got on the time of day that posts were sent out. But in conclusion, we feel strongly that social media is an important and established tool for the propagation of neurosurgical research and education, especially in this day and age, and the implementation of a specialized social media team has a demonstratable impact on increasing the online visibility of social media content and ultimately the hard work that authors put in to publishing in a journal. I want to thank the wonderful social media team, Jillian, Dr. Cohen-Goddall, and Dr. Rutka for this opportunity and for letting me be a part of their online team.

neurosurgery

social media team

online impact

metrics

journal visibility