
Tweeting can be a powerful tool for professionals and researchers to share their expertise and connect with others in their field. According to research, 71% of professionals believe that Twitter is an effective way to establish thought leadership.
To make the most of tweeting, it's essential to understand your audience. By analyzing your followers' interests and engagement patterns, you can tailor your content to resonate with them. For instance, a researcher found that tweeting about industry news and trends increased engagement by 25%.
A well-crafted tweet can make a lasting impression, but it's equally important to be mindful of your character limit. Studies show that tweets with fewer than 100 characters receive 17% more engagement than longer tweets.
Tweet Analysis
Tweets can be categorized based on their content, with three main categories assigned: Only paper hyperlink and/or title, inclusion of #hashtag, @username or other minor additions, and everything else that constitutes communication and human-like sentences.
To analyze the content of tweets, researchers opened each tweet and retweet in a web browser to examine the text and media features. This approach was necessary because the Twitter API only provides media content as shortened hyperlinks.
Tweets and retweets were also identified for containing hashtags, @user mentions, and for being Reply or Quote tweets, with Quote tweets being considered original tweets and retweets of Quote tweets counted in the retweet category.
Tweet Categorization
Tweet categorization is a crucial step in analyzing tweets, and it's done by assigning categories based on text and media features. Three categories were assigned: only paper hyperlink and/or title, inclusion of #hashtag, @username or other minor additions, and everything else that constitutes communication and human-like sentences.
Tweets and retweets were identified for containing hashtags, @user mentions, and for being Reply or Quote tweets. Quote tweets are a form of retweets, but they have an original contribution from users and can be retweeted, so they're counted as original tweets.
All tweets and retweets were opened in a web browser to analyze content features, as the Twitter API only provides media content as shortened hyperlinks. These shortened hyperlinks could link to the linked paper, webpages, quoted tweets, images, or videos.
Media content was categorized into three main codes: image, video, and article link preview. Article link preview contains a small snippet of the article displayed from the publisher's website and part of the paper title.
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Stay Organized
Staying organized on Twitter is crucial to maintaining a strong online presence. It's essential to tweet consistently, but not constantly, to show users you're active and generating thoughtful content.
TweetDeck and Hootsuite are great tools to help you schedule content in advance and create feeds that make it easy to see and respond to tweets.
80% of Twitter users are active on mobile devices, making it easy to keep track of your information on-the-go.
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Identify Yourself Correctly
Choose a Twitter handle that will make it easy to search and recognize who you are. It can be your name or the title of your blog if you have one.
A professional photo is a must-have for your Twitter profile. This will help people put a face to your name and make your profile more engaging.
Include a link to your website to drive traffic and increase your online presence. This will also help people learn more about you and your interests.
Your Twitter profile description should be a short summary of who you are and your experience/interests. Keep it concise and to the point, just like a resume.
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Tweet About Professional Topics
When creating your Twitter profile, it's essential to tweet about professional topics and interests.
You can start posting updates, creating original content or sharing/retweeting from other sources.
Make sure to keep it professional, engaging, and entertaining.
It's okay to have a personal twist in your tweets - it shows there's an actual person behind them.
Just remember to only post professional content.
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Follow Relevant Users
Following relevant users is a crucial step in building your Twitter network. You can use the search feature at the top of the page to find accounts that interest you.
To start, think about your goals - do you want to connect with colleagues, industry leaders, or companies you'd like to work for? Depending on your goal, you can use the search feature to find relevant accounts.
You can easily find an account you love using the search feature. It's a simple way to discover new accounts and start building your network.
Tweeting at an account with a simple greeting can be a great way to introduce yourself. If the person or brand you're tweeting at likes your content, they might even follow you back.
Finding accounts that interest you is just the first step - engaging with their content is also important.
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Findings and Features
Communication in tweets is quite unique, with human-like sentences appearing in 45% of tweets and significantly more apparent in retweets at about 63%.
Retweets tend to be more conversational, with @user mentions slightly but significantly more apparent than in tweets, about 27% compared to 23%.
Minor additions to content are less common overall, but more popular in tweets, occurring in 15% of tweets compared to just 6% of retweets.
Proportion Non-Zero
Proportion non-zero is a statistical method used to estimate tweets and retweets with non-zero content features. It's a way to compare the presence of different features in tweets and retweets.
A 95% confidence interval was used to determine the significance of the differences. If the confidence intervals overlap, it's considered insignificant, but if they don't overlap, it's considered significant.
According to the data, images show a consistent rise over time in both tweets and retweets. In 2014, images were present in about 30% of retweets, but by 2022, that number had risen to 80%.
Figures from paper are only slightly more present in retweets than in tweets, and have only slightly increased over time.
Findings
Individuals account for about half of the tweets (55%), but almost 81% of the retweets, with academic individuals and other individuals accounting for 37.5 and 30.5% respectively.
Communication, human-like sentences appear in 45% of tweets, but significantly more apparent in retweets at about 63%.

Bots and Organizations both have significantly higher contribution to tweets (20.2 and 19.1%, respectively) than to retweets (1.6 and 12.1%).
Over a third of tweets contain just a paper hyperlink and/or title (36%), compared to just below one-quarter of the retweets (23.8%).
Hashtags are present in about a quarter of both tweets and retweets, but @user mentions are slightly but significantly more apparent in retweets than in tweets (about 27% vs. 23%, power > 0.9).
Replies have a retweet rate that is half as likely as the rate for original tweets, approximately 8% compared to 14%.
Features in Tweets and Retweets
Communication is a key feature in tweets and retweets, with most original tweets containing human-like sentences produced by individuals, especially academic individuals and those in academia. About 32% of original tweets contain communication sentences, while this feature is even more prevalent in retweets, appearing in about 65% of them.
The majority of tweets by individuals and bots contain only a title and/or hyperlink to an academic article, with 10.5% and 10% frequency, respectively. This is similar to retweets, where individuals retweet these types of posts at a rate of 9.7%. Academic individuals are more likely to retweet these types of posts than they are to tweet them.
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Images are a popular feature in tweets and retweets, with individuals and academia tweeting images along with paper more than any other user category. However, individuals retweet images about five times more than they tweet them, with a significant difference in retweeting rates for professional individuals and other individuals.
The use of paper URL previews is also more apparent in retweets by individuals and academic individuals, with 30% and 15% frequency, respectively. This feature is less common in tweets, appearing in 7.3% and 3.5% of tweets by individuals and academic individuals, respectively.
Here's a breakdown of the content features in tweets and retweets:
- Communication sentences: 32% (original tweets), 65% (retweets)
- Only title and/or hyperlink: 10.5% (individuals), 10% (bots), 9.7% (individuals retweeting)
- Images: 10% (individuals), 7% (academia), 46% (individuals retweeting)
- Paper URL previews: 30% (individuals), 15% (academic individuals)
Overall, the content features in tweets and retweets vary significantly, with retweets often containing more human-like sentences, images, and paper URL previews than original tweets.
Top 10 Most Tweeted Papers
The top 10 most tweeted scientific dental papers were driven by three distinct patterns of tweeting.
Single issue tweeters were responsible for one of these patterns, where individuals would tweet about a specific article without engaging with the content.
Professional social media account management was another pattern, where organizations managed their social media accounts to promote the papers.
Broader tweeting, though often lacking original content, was the third pattern that contributed to the papers' popularity.
Feature Usage Trends
Tweets and retweets have some key differences in terms of feature usage over time. Almost all years show a significantly higher number of tweets than retweets for the categories "only paper hyperlink and or title" and "hashtag, @user mention or minor additions".
The use of text content in tweets and retweets has been trending downwards in some areas, with original tweets showing a slight drop from about 40% to 20% and retweets dropping from about 20% to around 5% for the category "only paper hyperlink and or title".
Retweets have been more likely to be inaccessible than original tweets, often being deleted, limited, or sent from suspended accounts.
There's been a significant increase in the use of human-like sentences in both tweets and retweets, with tweets rising from about 20% in 2016 to 60% in 2022 and retweets increasing from about 50% in 2015 to 90% in 2022.
Hashtag usage has been consistent across tweets and retweets over time.
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Discussion and Recommendations
As you start tweeting, keep in mind that your tweets can be seen by anyone, including employers, educators, and even potential clients, so it's essential to maintain a professional online presence.
Tweeting can be a great way to connect with others and share your thoughts, but it's also easy to get carried away and post something you might regret.
The 280-character limit can be a challenge, but it's actually a blessing in disguise, forcing you to be concise and creative with your words.
To avoid getting into trouble, it's crucial to understand Twitter's rules and guidelines, which prohibit hate speech, harassment, and other forms of abusive behavior.
Remember, once you post something on Twitter, it's out there forever, so make sure you're comfortable with what you're sharing.
A good rule of thumb is to think before you tweet, and consider whether your words could be misinterpreted or cause offense.
Twitter's algorithm favors tweets that get a lot of engagement, so try to include questions, hashtags, and eye-catching images to get more people talking.
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Data and Methods
In 2016, Web of Science included 84 journals in its category Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine.
The researchers used Web of Science and PubMed to download references to papers in these journals.
PubMed indexed 47 journals that were active and published in the United States.
The complete list of journals can be found in the supplemental material.
References to papers in these journals were downloaded from Web of Science and PubMed.
These databases provide PubMed IDs, which were used to find tweets about the papers in the Altmetric.com database.
Altmetric.com is one of the main providers of altmetric data and tracks mentions and links to scientific literature from social media platforms, news media coverage, and policy documents.
Twitter is the predominant source of social media data in Altmetric.com.
The researchers obtained the text tweeted, account name, and time posted for each tweet, as well as flagged retweets.
The cited journal article's title and bibliographic reference were also added to the data.
The final dataset contained 2,202 US-based accounts that sent 8,206 tweets about 4,358 dental papers between June 2011 and June 2016.
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Trending Topics
Trending topics are a great way to stay up-to-date on what's happening online.
You can search for hashtags like #socialmedia, #Twitter, and #jobs to find tweets related to these topics.
Using hashtags allows you to search for specific content on Twitter.
If you're at a networking or professional event, they'll often have hashtags relating to the event.
For more insights, see: How to Find Trending Topics on Social Media
Frequently Asked Questions
What does tweeting mean in slang?
In slang, "tweeting" refers to posting short messages on social media, typically on platforms like Twitter. It's a way to share quick updates or thoughts with others online.
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