The Impact of Social Media on Readership of a Peer-Reviewed Medical Journal C. Matthew Hawkins, MD a , Bruce J. Hillman, MD b , Ruth C. Carlos, MD, MS c , James V. Rawson, MD d , Rebecca Haines, MSM, CAE e , Richard Duszak Jr, MD f Purpose: Social media microblogging has made major inroads in physician education and information exchange. The authors evaluated their early experience with Twitter “tweet chat” sessions as a medium to expand the reach and audience of a peer-reviewed radiology journal. Methods: The authors analyzed Twitter activity metadata tagged with the #JACR hashtag from the first 6 tweet chat sessions sponsored and promoted by JACR. The assessment included multiple metrics: radiologist versus nonradiologist session participants, individual tweets, tweets with embedded web links, common words, retweets, and impressions. We correlated Twitter metrics with temporally related journal website activity. Results: Each session generated a mean of 444  172 tweets contributed by a mean of 33  14 participants (45.4% nonradiologists) and resulted in a mean of 1,163,712  441,971 impressions. Per session, a mean of 19  7.6 tweets contained web links, and 138  35.6 tweets were retweets. Monthly journal website article views increased from 31,220 to 41,017 (þ31.4%), journal website visits increased from 9,192 to 11,539 (þ25.5%), and unique visitors increased from 7,368 to 8,841 (þ20%). Since JACR tweet chats were initiated, mean monthly journal website visits and page views per month directly from twitter.com increased from 24 to 101 (þ321%) and from 38 to 159 (þ318%), respectively. Conclusions: Early experience with JACR tweet chats demonstrates that organizing Twitter microblogging activities around topics of general interest to their target readership bears the potential for medical journals to increase their audiences and reach. Key Words: Social media, peer-reviewed literature, education J Am Coll Radiol 2014;11:1038-1043. Copyright © 2014 American College of Radiology INTRODUCTION Social media provide a means by which individuals can share information and opinions rapidly, spontaneously, and sometimes virally with colleagues, followers, and friends. Twitter (http://twitter.com; San Francisco, California) is the most popular social media micro- blogging platform, with 240 million monthly users who contribute approximately 500 million posts per day [1]. Microblogging posts on Twitter consist of messages of 140 characters or fewer. These can contain shortened links to websites as well as metadata hashtags (indicated by “#”) that can promote web traffic and assist in tracking user trends. Although Twitter is most widely used for personal communication, its role in professional interchanges is expanding. A growing body of literature documents its increasing use in medical education and patient engagement [2-7]. For example, the use of social media by physicians and other attendees at national medical meetings has been increasing. Twitter engages attendees at medical meetings to interact over the meeting agenda [2-8]. This growth is such that a recent review of social media use in medical education concluded that Twitter use is an emerging field of scholarship that presents medical educators with innovative opportunities and warrants further investigation [9]. In response to the growing use of social media and its potential for information exchange between diverse au- diences, JACR recently launched a social media initiative a Department of Radiology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. b Departments of Radiology and Medical Imaging and Public Health Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. c Department of Radiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. d Department of Radiology and Imaging, Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University, Augusta, Georgia. e American College of Radiology, Reston, Virginia. f Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia. Corresponding author and reprints: C. Matthew Hawkins, MD, University of Washington, Department of Radiology, 1959 NE Pacific Street, SS-202, Seattle, WA 98195; e-mail: hawkcm@gmail.com. 1038 ª 2014 American College of Radiology 1546-1440/14/$36.00  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2014.07.029