Abstract

BACKGROUND: Plastic surgeons are increasingly turning to social media to market their services. The newly released Twitter Academic Research Product Track (TARPT) database provides free, customizable analysis of keywords that are included in tweets on the Twitter platform. The TARPT tool may provide valuable insight into public interest in cosmetic surgery procedures.OBJECTIVES: To determine TARPT's utility in tracking and predicting public interest in cosmetic surgery procedures and to examine temporal trends in tweets related to cosmetic facial and body procedures.METHODS: The TARPT tool was used to calculate total number of tweets containing keywords related to 10 facial cosmetic procedures and 7 cosmetic body procedures from 2010 to 2020. Annual volumes for respective procedures were obtained from annual statistics reports of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) from 2010 to 2020. Univariate linear regression was used to compare tweet volumes and procedure volumes, taking P < 0.05 as the cutoff for significance.RESULTS: Variations in tweet volume were observed. Univariate linear regression analysis demonstrated statistically significant positive correlations between tweet volumes and ASPS procedure volumes for 7 search terms: "eyelid lift", "facelift", "lip injections", "mastopexy", "butt lift", "butt implants", and "liposuction". Many procedure-related keywords were not significant, demonstrating the importance of careful selection of Twitter search terms.CONCLUSIONS: The TARPT database represents a promising novel source of information for plastic surgeons, which the potential to inform marketing and advertising decisions for emerging trends in plastic surgery interest before these patterns become apparent in surgical or clinical volumes.

View details for DOI 10.1093/asj/sjab429

View details for PubMedID 34962572