Or, might it be how you use it that matters?
This is a brief report from the journal Circulation, regarding a self-assessment of their social media strategy. The editors of the journal performed a prospective, block-randomization of published articles to either social media promotion on Facebook and Twitter, or no promotion, and compared 30-day website page views for each article. 121 articles were randomized to social media and 122 to control, and were generally evenly balanced between article types.
And, the answer – unfortunately, for their 3-person associate editor team – is: no difference. Articles posted to social media received an average of 409 pageviews within 30-days, compared with 392 to those with no promotion. Thus, the journal of Circulation declares social media dead – and ultimately generalizes their failures to all cardiovascular journals via their Conclusions section.
So, we should all stop blogging and tweeting? Or, is journal self-promotion futile? And, are page views the best measure of the effectiveness of knowledge translation? Or, is there more nuance and heterogeneity between online strategies, rendering this Circulation data of only passing curiosity? I tend to believe the latter – but, certainly, it’s an interesting publication I hope inspires other journals to perform their own, similarly rigorous studies.
[Note: if my blog entries receive as many (or more!) pageviews as Circulation articles, does this mean my impact factor is higher than Circulation’s 14.98?]
“A Randomized Trial of Social Media from Circulation”
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/early/2014/11/17/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.013509.abstract
I'm a long-time blog reader of yours- maybe they should've used your blog as one of the social media sites? I'd imagine that they're numbers would have been very different. :o) Thanks for all of the awesome content.
I'm a bit curious of what method they're using to measure their page views as, according to the Circulation blog, "…[they] received 3.45 million impressions on Twitter last week and reached 1.35 million unique accounts. However, despite these impressive numbers, the manuscript has received only 405 page views." I have no doubt that most folks haven't looked at the original article, but there still seems to be a huge disconnect between the hits their site is registering and their social media engagement. Their Facebook page, though it has low levels of interaction, still has modest reach, and the same goes for their Twitter.
I can see why the results could wash out in the trial—I follow their Facebook page yet rarely comment or follow links unless the article is of particular interest to my niche—but it seems odd that even this article with a generous level of interaction isn't generating many hits on their website. I'd expect most of their articles to benefit little from social media as the topics are often dry (especially since articles with an accompanying press release were excluded), of minimal immediate clinical impact, and are not readily discussable by most folks that do not specialize in the topic, but this is the sort of thing ripe for social media interaction and it's very odd that they're not seeing an uptick in actual page views.
"I'd expect most of their articles to benefit little from social media as the topics are often dry …"
Indeed. It really doesn't matter whether you flog an article on social media if the content is of no interest. Since specific exclusions were made for articles promoted through other means (re: interesting articles), just pimping out boring crap through social media is unlikely to be successful.
I left what I felt to be a thoughtful and constructive reply to a post about this article on the Circulation blog back on Nov 24 and it's still yet to be approved or replied to (and there's no others so it's not like it was lost in the mix). At first I was willing to give them a break because it seemed like they were trying with this study, but after hearing from folks who have also tried to engage with them and their parent, the AHA, on social media over the past few years, I'm seeing that is par for the course.
At first I was disappointed because I thought they wanted to play on our turf but were just having trouble—linking boring articles and probably mis-counting hits on the popular ones—but it's looking more like they want to play by their understanding of the rules and are sad we won't meet them half-way. I should have known better because I (and others) been engaging their EKG cases for a couple of years and getting nowhere with corrections or requests, but I presumed it was because they didn't have any interest in social media. Instead it looks like they want to have a social media presence, they just want that presence to be their giant monolith standing in the middle, doling out their wisdom to us lowly individuals. No thanks AHA.
Yes – there's more than one way to be active on social media. You can put in a lot or very little effort and meet with similar success (or non-success), depending on the quality of the interaction and the audience needs. It's an interesting study; I hope there are more like it.