Who Wants to Be Famous!

And by fame, I mean Twitter fame.

Based on SCIENCE!

This is a retrospective study of you, all you, you lab rats you, spinning your wheels about on the Twitter. This lovely study took four years of #FOAMed, chopped up all the tweets into little pieces, and ran the pieces through R. Specifically, they chopped up the tweets of a cluster of 238 heavily-retweeted tweeters (twits?), and analyzed their various attributes and flavors to determine those with the greatest likelihood of being retweeted.

And, the #1 determinant of whether a tweet would be retweeted and make you famous …

… was to be famous already, specifically, a tweet from one of 21 accounts with large (mostly >15,000) amounts of Twitter followers.

For the rest of us on the fringe of fame or worse, here were predictors of high retweet volume:

• Tweets on resuscitation, trauma, neurology, infectious disease, pulmonary topics, and ultrasound.
• Tweets with images, advertisements, or research critiques.
• Avoidance of mental health topics, blog links, or “questions”.

The appendices are full of entertaining nuggets, including the top tweets of the study period – dominated by @EM_RESUS. Splendid work!

“Trends and Predictors of Retweets in Free Open Access Medical Education (#FOAMed) on Twitter (2013-7)”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30343518