Which Types of Facebook Posts Yield the Best Response for Radiology Education: A One-Year Analysis of What We Learned

We post several times daily on our Facebook page, CTisus, to educate radiology students and professionals globally. We aimed to determine how our data compared for different types of posts and ascertain the popularity of videos versus case images, illustrations versus case images, and whether cinematic rendering performed better than traditional computed tomography. We exported data for one year's worth of Facebook posts (November 1, 2020 to October 31, 2021) and categorized posts into 18 types. Our primary outcome was popularity of each post, measured by “reach” and “engagement” counts provided by Facebook. Among the 9057 posts exported, “just for fun” posts performed the best, followed by quiz images. Case images performed significantly better than instructional videos ( p < 0.0001). However, the opposite was true for engagement, where instructional videos performed significantly better than case images ( p  = 0.0012). For both reach and engagement, case images performed better than medical illustrations ( p < 0.0001). For both reach ( p < 0.0005) and engagement ( p < 0.0001), traditional computed tomography performed significantly better than cinematic rendering. All video types had better engagement than case images and medical illustrations ( p < 0.0001) and both had significantly better engagement than text ( p < 0.0001). Our results may help other educators choose what types of content to create and post on social media to achieve the best impact on learners.