title: Who has Australia's most-followed Twitter accounts in health and medicine?
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia simon.chapman@sydney.edu.au.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chapman
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Becky
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Freeman
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia; D006801:Humans; D008511:Medicine; D011634:Public Health; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*