How do you find your tribe on Twitter? Finding followers and accounts you want to follow is the core of social media networking online. There are many ways to find your colleagues on social media. Among the most effective is to identify a few key hashtags that are especially relevant to you, and then determine which hashtags are related. Follow a few of those, and you’ll soon identify the accounts that are a good match for you. You can begin retweeting their content, and using their hashtags. You can also join their chats!
For those interested in women in medicine active on social media, I did a little research for you. I analyzed Twitter data from January 1, 2018 to today (August 24th, 2018). Because my analytics come from a healthcare oriented system, I was able to filter for use by physicians and other healthcare professionals, including researchers and academic institution or departmental accounts.
In the digital social media space, at least on Twitter, the most popular hashtag far and away is #hcsm. I ran an analysis of the top 20 related hashtags. Here they are:
I have also been very interested in the rapid growth of professional advocacy for women online this year, so I ran an analysis of #WomenInMedicine and the 20 most frequently related hashtags:
Then I combined #hcsm and #WomenInMedicine into a single data set to see which 20 hashtags really stood out:
Those hashtags are very well established, as you can see from the volume of tweets this year. But how does a community grow? With strategic hashtagging, of course! #GirlMedTwitter is relatively newer, so I checked out their top 20 related hashtags. They keep very good company:
Of course, there are plenty of hashtags listed above that are general for social media and general for advocacy. Here are a few other popular hashtags that are related but much more broad across professional domains, some specific to science, and some reaching far and wide into academia and other disciplines entirely:
#PressForProgress #AcademicTwitter #WomenLeaders #WomenInLeadership #WomeninScience #WomenInLaw #WomenLawyers #WomenInBusiness #SheForShe
What are the other major hashtags you use to network with your professional colleagues on Twitter? Let me know – via Twitter of course – I may include you and your tweeted suggestions in a future update to this post!
Happy #FollowFriday!
