Twitter and the dissemination of research evidence

Trip aggregates some wonderful content.  The main route for people finding this evidence is via search or by registering with Trip and indicating what topic areas they're interested (in which case we email the user with the latest research that matches their interests).Towards Christmas I started to experiment with using Twitter as a dissemination route.  Basically, I created two topic areas (Primary care and Cancer) and starting tweeting simply the title of the article and the URL of relevant articles that were recently added to Trip.  The Trip techie (Phil) suggested I use some tracking to see if people are actually clicking on the articles and so I started using a site called Bitly which has been brilliant.  It basically showed that people were clicking in quite large numbers on the articles I had tweeted. So, 5 days ago I started three more topic areas (respiratory, child health and CVD).  So, the results:Primary care - 557 followersCancer - 155 followersCVD - 38 followersRespiratory - 169 followersChild Health - 129 followersAs of writing this there have been 2,050 clicks, see image below (click to enlarge) In addition we can track which articles have been clicked on the most and some have been spectacular, here are the top 5:Diagnosing pneumonia in patients with acute cough: clinical judgment compared to chest radiography Eur Respir J - 128 clicksProphylactic antibiotic therapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) Cochrane - 62 ...
Source: Liberating the literature - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs