Title: The impact of social media promotion on article reads

 

Intro:

 

In the past year, the International Journal of Obstetric Anaesthesia (IJOA) has tried to increase engagement with their scientific articles by focusing on the use of social media. The social media platform ‘Instagram’ has been used by IJOA to communicate directly with their target audience. In this study, we examined if articles promoted via the IJOA Instagram page in 2025 received more reads than those which were not promoted via Instagram.

 

Methods:

 

Data demonstrating individual IJOA article reads was obtained for a 12 month period (2025) Some IJOA articles are promoted either by ‘single descriptive posts’ or  carousels of infographics (‘IJOA at a glance’) on Instagram on a weekly basis. We divided all articles for 2025 into two groups based on whether or not they had been promoted via the Instagram page. The median number of reads (and associated interquartile ranges, IQR) were calculated for both groups and compared using the Mann-Whitney test.

 

Results:

 

In 2025, 192 articles were published in IJOA. 43 articles received Instagram promotion and 149 did not. The median number of reads [Q1, Q3] was higher for the articles which received Instagram promotion (168 [115,293]) than those which did not (121 [40, 174]), p=0.001.

 

 

Discussion:

 

These results suggest that there is an association between social media promotion of scientific papers and the number of full-text reads a scientific article receives. This demonstrates that focusing on social media may be a useful strategy for scientific journals to promote engagement with their articles.