Correspondence Article Type Letter by Semsarian and Ingles Regarding Article, “A Randomized Trial of Social Media From Circulation”

for President Barack Obama or 220 000 followers of the New England Journal of Medicine on Twitter) and would therefore limit the impact of any social media campaign. We agree entirely with Fox et al that the present study, although negative, stimulates further research to elucidate the most effective way to use social media to promote research and to promote education and knowledge among the cardiovascular readership and the wider community.

To the Editor: We read with great interest the article by Fox et al1 on the impact of social media on journal article views. The authors should be congratulated first for studying the role of social media in the setting of journal article views and second for using a randomized, controlled trial methodology to rigorously investigate the intervention. The impact of social media in all aspects of life is substantial and is widely accessible on a global scale. With >1 billion people using Facebook and the growing acceptance of platforms such as Twitter to disseminate information rapidly and across broad populations, it is likely that such social media approaches can affect many aspects of cardiovascular medicine, research, and education. Although the present study showed no impact of social media on journal article views, there are likely to be important limitations that may have masked potential beneficial effects of social media. Our main concern is the outcome measure of “30-day page views,” which is really just one aspect of measuring the effect of the social media exposure. First, the time period may be too short to truly measure page views. Second, some people may have been exposed to the article heading and summary but chose not to open the page. Third, measures such as how many times the Facebook or Twitter post was shared or retweeted may illustrate the exponential effect of cumulative exposure and rapid dissemination of the article in question. Our group has recently demonstrated the benefits of Twitter notifications and retweets in spreading information rapidly among the cardiovascular community.2 Fourth, other measures of outcome very relevant to the journal readership might be considered in longer-term studies, specifically whether the social media campaign affects journal citations. There is some emerging evidence that judicious tweets, directing or “pinpointing” followers to specific articles, may increase journal citations.3 Furthermore, for a successful social media campaign, high numbers of baseline followers are essential. At the start of the study by Fox et al, there were 2219 followers of @CircAHA Twitter and 16 215 followers of the Circulation Facebook page. These would be considered modest numbers (compared with 50.4 million followers

Disclosures None. Christopher Semsarian, MBBS, PhD, MPH Jodie Ingles, BBiomedSc, PhD, MPH Agnes Ginges Centre for Molecular Cardiology Centenary Institute Sydney, NSW, Australia Sydney Medical School University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia Department of Cardiology Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Sydney, NSW, Australia

References 1. Fox CS, Bonaca MA, Ryan JJ, Massaro JM, Barry K, Loscalzo J. A randomized trial of social media from Circulation. Circulation. 2015;131:28–33. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.013509. 2. Redfern J, Ingles J, Neubeck L, Johnston S, Semsarian C. Tweeting our way to cardiovascular health. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2013;61:1657–1658. doi: 10.1016/j.jacc.2013.01.041. 3. Eysenbach G. Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. J Med Internet Res. 2011;13:e123. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2012.

(Circulation. 2015;131:e394. DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.014628.) © 2015 American Heart Association, Inc. Circulation is available at http://circ.ahajournals.org

DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.014628

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Letter by Semsarian and Ingles regarding article, "A randomized trial of social media from Circulation".

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