All right, so I want to thank you guys for having me. I am a hepatologist at the University of Michigan, but I also co-lead the Michigan Liver Account, which is a hepatology-focused account that we started about two years ago at the University of Michigan. And I'm going to go into kind of some of the ins and outs of how we developed it and how we use it to this day. So these are my disclosures. Again, these are not relevant to this topic. So we're going to talk about goals and why should we do it, why should we invest the time in putting together a divisional account, what are the benefits, what are the pitfalls? I'll try to, you know, not use too many emojis during this meeting. What are the risks? Okay. And then we'll talk about some practical strategies that have worked and some practical tips overall. All right, so there are a lot of divisional accounts out there. And you know, these vary between hepatology crowns. This one's from IU, Duke GI, which is an umbrella account, which includes GI and hepatology, Yale Digestive Diseases, Brigham and Women's GI, BCM, Gastro, and of course, Michigan Hepatology. So there's lots out there. People do this. And everybody uses this a little bit differently. And the goals, you know, of how you set this up or why you set this up really dictate how it's used and, you know, how it can help you. So there are, you know, questions. Why should you make an account? Why should you make a divisional Twitter account? And these are some potential goals that could be used. And now, like I said, everybody does this a little differently, and there's no right answer here. So clearly, you know, you increase the visibility of work done by a broad range of staff. And you know, this is important. You know, not everybody has Elliot Tapper in their division. Some people have people that don't like to tweet or they don't feel comfortable. And this gives you a way of, you know, saying, okay, this is kind of an anonymous way of promoting people's work. People don't, people sometimes feel like they're bragging when they tweet their own stuff out. And you know, a divisional account can overcome that. It increases the visibility of awards and honors. People get a K award. People get a foundational award. You know, you want to make sure people know that. You can publicize open clinical trials. This is the more patient-facing part, but also your colleagues on Twitter. If you have a patient that may meet a trial inclusion criteria and they know your trial is open because of Twitter, that's a win, potentially. And we've had patients enrolled in some of our HCC trials because of what has been publicized on Twitter. This can also be effective for recruiting. I think it makes a potential faculty feel better than having the divisional Twitter account tweet out that they came and visited and gave a job talk and they did a fantastic job. And so, you know, that is, you know, a positive messaging that can happen. And it also lets fellows know about your program, prospective fellows know about your program. And so it can help in recruitment in that. Now, we don't have data to support this, so this is conjecture, but, you know, this is, these are potentials. It can connect you to alumni, you know. We all have divisional, divisions that, you know, love the donations or love connecting with their alumni. And this is one way to do that, to let them know what's going on on a up-to-date basis. It can connect with community physicians, your referral base. And we have several community physicians in Michigan that follow our Twitter account, and they know what's going on in terms of trials, patient stuff, research, obviously. It can also interface with patients. A lot of our cirrhosis patients aren't quite there with the Twitter yet, but, you know, we have several young patients that are engaged, and they actually message us and send us, you know, interact with some of our tweets. Certainly along that line, public relations, you know, types of announcements, and then medical education and CME. Now, at Michigan Liver, we haven't really gone down the tutorial path. We've talked about it. It does take a lot of work. But you can, you know, also live tweet what's going on with your CME events locally. So these are some potential goals. There are probably others that I missed, but these are the ones that I could think of off. So what are some examples of what we sent out? So publications, obviously. We sent, you know, this is one from this summer, you know, where we used our hashtagging. We used our graphics and, you know, give a little insight into what the paper was about and a link to it. Public health, you know, October was liver cancer month, awareness month, and this was from the Department of Public Health in Michigan, and we augmented this messaging. Awards, this is Jessica Mellinger when she got her K award in alcoholic liver disease. We put a tweet out about that. And certainly meetings. We try to be active at these meetings. It is busy because, you know, both Ellie and I have a lot of other stuff going on. You have to plan it out, and we'll talk about that in a second, but you can publicize what people are doing. This is when Dr. Razumalava at DDW gave a talk. So how do we get started? So there's lots of pitfalls here, and I think, you know, some of them have been summarized nice, but there's something particular about having an institutional account. You are representing not only your individual self or not your individual self, you're representing your university. So you really have to have institutional buy-in to do this, okay? And that's very important. We had lots of meetings before we started this account about responsibility, who's going to be responsible, and understanding the social media policy of our institution. So really understanding what your organizational social media resources are, do you need to coordinate with other accounts? Is there already a GI account? Do you want to do a hepatology account? Is that worth it? You know, is that, you know, is there enough juice for the squeeze there? The policy part is really important. Every institution is developing their own social media policies. So you shouldn't come away from this with your own institutional account starting in the hallway out here. You got to, you know, you got to get into it. You got to set some goals for the account, okay? What are the goals? I talked about some of the potential benefits. So what are the goals that you want to have for that? Pick a handle that makes sense, okay? Our handle is Michigan Liver. You shouldn't do, like, YXCF342, you know, at that. Make it easy, okay? That's just an easy tip. And then obtain commitments for tweeting. Now this is hard. So I will say that there's some institutions that give protected time to people to tweet their faculty. Who does it is really important, okay? And you know, there are some places where fellows do it. And you can imagine there could be issues with that. There's some places where administrators do it. And again, we can talk about issues with that. And then obviously there's places where faculty does it. And how are you going to do the work and how are you going to split it up? Because there's nothing worse than starting a Twitter account and then having it be silent with crickets. So you really, if you're going to do this, you might as well be active. And that goes into the idea of, you know, why are we doing this? And we do this because we want to represent the people in our division. And so, you know, you have to be ready to tweet or you have to be, make the commitment. So the benefits align with the goals of the account and the effort put in. You know, putting in effort will yield benefits. The follower, you know, I will say that these niche accounts can really have good engagement. And that's the nice thing. The people that follow you want to follow you. They don't feel obligated. Like the University of Michigan account, the Michigan Medicine account, has 30,000 followers. But their engagement is pretty low, you know. But we have, you know, 1,300 followers now, but we get very high engagement with all of our tweets. Because the people that want to follow us get a lot out of it. So at Michigan Liver, our goal was really to promote work and awards by our faculty and our trainees. And the unique aspects that we have that may not apply, this is why we were able to do this. We have a large and productive faculty. And we have several members that are active in social media. So that makes things easier. And again, everybody's a little bit different in how this does it. So I always get asked, you know, does this really have any benefit? Are you just kind of doing this? You know, are we in a dystopian world where you're just sitting there staring on your phone constantly looking at what the next tweet is? And I will say that we do run into this problem or this danger. But there are benefits that are tangible. It does increase visibility. You know, I think we've already, we can see that. You can measure that by impressions and clicks, and we'll see what that looks like metric-wise. It can be really helpful for highlighting junior faculty and fellows for the reasons I mentioned earlier. It is, there has been some early studies that tweeting out articles has been associated with increased reads and downloads. And there's really relatively weak correlation with citations due to lots of factors. But you know, this is some of the research that's coming out. And I will argue that tweeting really complements or augments the real work that goes into engagement. You know, this is just one part, one tool we have if you want to be an engaged person out there or organization. So building a team, tweeting takes time, okay? Curating this content takes time, it can be daily. At these meetings, you know, we're tweeting all the time. It really can be challenging, so having a co-manager can be really helpful. And having at least two people with content expertise manage the account. They have to know what's going on if you really want it to be useful, okay? Having an administrator do this, unless they're really on the pulse of what's going on within your division, may not, you know, get all the benefits that you potentially could have out of it. What Elliot and I do, we alternate responsibility by month so that nobody gets burnt out. And you know, with a successful team, you guys can, you know, you can work together and have lots of good success. So there are risks, okay? You can post inappropriate content or offensive. You know, this is where you run into responsibility and making sure you have a code of conduct before you get started. You can have trolls posting offensive comments. There is a block feature out there. We've thankfully haven't really run into this much at this point. But it does happen on Twitter. And you can post sensitive information. You have to really follow your institutional guidelines and remember HIPAA is important. And really, what if you're, you know, you've set up this account, nobody's following you, and you don't have any interactions. Effort equals followers. Strategies that have worked. As I mentioned, two faculty with privileges for account management. Monthly solicitation of content from faculty. They give summary picture or they provide tweets with content. And we really do the best to try to represent the breadth of our faculty. It's really important to do that if you're going to do this. It can't just be your two favorite people in the division. It's got to be everybody. Ask other institutional accounts like our UMich Medicine to retweet impactful stuff that comes out. As you can see here, this is the account. Retweeting and liking tweets from our faculty really augment, amplify what we talked about. You tag relevant journal accounts on Twitter. These are some of the ones that, you know, we tag often depending on what's coming out. Societies, as we mentioned. Other external accounts. Scientists and institutions. Just because you have a divisional account doesn't mean you just have to focus on people within your division. So what doesn't work? Meetings can be overwhelming. You really have to plan ahead. There are programs where you can schedule tweets, like HootSuite and Twittimer. You can schedule it out so that the tweets will go out to correspond with talks. Tweeting links without content or images results in much less interaction. This is something that we tweeted out this summer. Two likes, 717 impressions. Two weeks later, we tweeted out the journal, you know, of course an analog paper in general. 9,000 impressions with 123 link clicks. So, you know, these are ways you can augment things. And obtain good quality pictures of your faculty and fellows. This is a small tip, too. This is something we tweeted out when Mary Thompson got her ASLW award, but sorry, Mary, it was a little blurry. And that's, you know, most of what I have to say. So some tips and conclusions. Tweeting can be an important engagement strategy to augment the work done by the division. Setting goals and building a team is really essential. And figuring out your institutional policies is important. But it is important to keep active and put in effort to really build that engaged following you're looking for. So I thank you for your attention.

hepatologist

divisional Twitter account

increasing visibility

institutional buy-in

successful tweeting