#neoTwitter: evaluation of its use within the neonatal-perinatal community

Abstract

Twitter is an important tool for digital communication and a growing area for health research. However, given the vast amount of information available to users daily (e.g., 500 million tweets/day), it is important to organize tweets so that users can access relevant information efficiently. One way of doing so is through hashtags, used to label tweets. In neonatology, several specific hashtags have been used; however, a unifying umbrella hashtag broadly targeting neonatal content had not been specified. On World Prematurity Day (November 17, 2020), our group registered the hashtag #neoTwitter in Symplur’s ‘Healthcare Hashtag Project’ to help unify neonatal content under a common hashtag. We sought to evaluate neonatal stakeholders’ subsequent use of #neoTwitter.