Who has Australia’s most-followed Twitter accounts in health and medicine?

Simon Chapman; Becky Freeman

doi:10.1071/phrp2531534

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Who has Australia’s most-followed Twitter accounts in health and medicine?

Simon Chapman ^A ^* and Becky Freeman ^A

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A School of Public Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.

^* Correspondence to: simon.chapman@sydney.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 25, e2531534 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp2531534

Published: 9 July 2015

2015 ≥ Chapman and Freeman. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.

Abstract

Twitter is a social media platform that can be used by people working in health and medicine to distribute information, advocate, debate and network with large numbers of other users. We set out to determine the top 10 Australian Twitter accounts in four categories, ranked by number of Twitter followers. We extracted names with high follower volumes from ?lists? of health and medical Twitter accounts, and then ?crowdsourced? on Twitter for names that were not included on those lists. Individuals tweeting on single-issue topics (especially sugar, nutrition and fitness), health institutions, and people working in the media had higher Twitter followings and lower tweet-to-follower ratios than those tweeting on mixed health topics. Tweeting pictures was nominated by several as a way of attracting retweets. Highly followed Twitter users expressed a variety of benefits of using Twitter.