SOCIAL MEDIA
Digital engagement, content creation

The Journal of Trauma, like many academic titles, was late to adopt social media. Initially, an RSS feed was used to push article titles to approximately 1,000 followers. In 2014, the publisher permitted the editorial team to curate the social channel.

Within a week of active tweeting, engagement surged by 6400%. Subsequent A/B testing of messaging resulted in development of a social media roadmap. By 2017, the journal had grown its audience to more than 10,000 followers, ranking second in social authority among surgery publications.

VISUAL ABSTRACTS

Pioneered by physical science journals in 2010, visual abstracts proved to be a popular feature in surgery. The idea was to condense selected articles into their most salient takeaways. Graphical abstracts were posted as articles published and linked back to free, full-text sources.

LIVE TWEETING

In addition to providing live commentary of events, social posts were also created ahead-of-time and posted during keynote addresses.

SOCIAL STORYTELLING

To  preserve scientific discussion, online discussions were aggregated into readable narratives. For conferences, best-of tweets were selected and posted daily. For online journal clubs, conversational threads were sorted into topics and buttressed with links to papers and other resources.