The Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas (Actas) Facebook page was officially launched on February 4, 2012 (https://www.facebook.com/ActasDermosifiliograficas). With around 1.2 billion registered users, Facebook is currently the world's largest social network,1,2 and over 90% of all social network users today are Facebook members.2,3 In light of the growing importance of this social network in the daily lives of both doctors and patients, Actas decided to create a Facebook page to provide content for dermatologists and other specialists who use digital media.

Other successful dermatology journals—including the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (JAAD), JAMA Dermatology, and the British Journal of Dermatology—joined Facebook around the same time as Actas did. Despite their short history on this platform, some of these journals have already published analyses of their Facebook presence, which are generally positive and indicate a very promising future for this digital media.4 However, as yet, most dermatology journals have no web 2.0 presence4 and Actas is a pioneer in this area because our journal has been quick to adapt to the new web 2.0 in medicine and to the digital future of medical journals on the Internet.5

The primary aim of the present article is to evaluate the benefits obtained from our Facebook page, identifying the factors that attract users and promote user engagement with the content. It is hoped that the results of this analysis will lead to the creation of new tools that will help to improve and optimize Actas Internet content.

To this end, in January 2014, the administrators of the Actas Facebook page reviewed the information provided in the page's insights section, which provides demographic information on the page's followers and friends and metrics on users’ engagement with its content. The demographic data by sex and age shown in Figure 1 reveals that 57.9% of the page's users are women as compared to 40.7% men. In the age analysis, the group that most often consults or accesses the Actas page is aged between 25 and 34 years, and the second most active group is between 35 and 44 years. Other findings that emerged from the analysis were the users’ country, city of residence, and primary language (Table 1). While most of our users live in Spain or Latin America, it is interesting to see that there are a growing number of users from other countries, including Egypt, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom.

Figure 1.

Demographic data of Actas Facebook page users.

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Facebook updates are posted daily, many aimed at promoting the dissemination of the journal by way of simple and effective comments likely to attract the attention of Internet users. The posts are organized into different categories: article of the month, editor's opinion, case for diagnosis, image of the week, coming up in Actas, popular science news, etc. The aim is to attract faithful readers who are interested in the content and will share the posts on their own Facebook pages, thereby generating an exponential dissemination of the journal's contents. The language used is a key factor in this new channel for Actas. The publication of posts in English as well as in Spanish is a key component in the strategy for promoting the Actas Facebook page worldwide.

In the analysis of our page we identified the posts with the greatest reach and dissemination among our visitors in 2013. The top ten most popular posts are listed in Table 2. The most successful updates and those that elicited the most engagement from the journal's followers were the posts on cases for diagnosis and the picture of the week and the comments about review articles on topics of interest in Actas. Although it is difficult to predict which posts will gain greater acceptance among users, this type of analysis provides very useful feedback that will help us to generate interesting and useful content.

The dermatology journal that currently enjoys the greatest success on Facebook is JAAD with 5924 followers. The editors of JAAD recently assessed the first year's activity of their Facebook page and reported that during the busiest month the page received 204 478 page views,4 a figure far higher than the average number of page views per month for the official JAAD web page, which is 134 664. On the basis of these findings, the authors concluded that the potential of Facebook in the field of medical journals far exceeds all the tools used for this purpose to date.

The Actas Facebook page currently has 400 active daily users. Saturday and Sunday are the 2 days of the week on which the page registers the most active users. The time slot in which users most often visit the page and interact is between 9 pm and 11.30 pm (Spanish time), with visits peaking around 10pm. In addition, the regular users of the Actas Facebook page share its content on other social networks, thereby extending the reach and expanding the target audience of the journal's posts.

A research article published recently in JAMA Dermatology evaluated the use of social networks by the international dermatology community and the impact of this new channel in recent years.5 Those authors included Actas in the list of 20 dermatology journals with the greatest presence on the social networks today, together with JAMA Dermatology, JAAD, and the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Dermatology Research. This means that the data emerging from the initial analysis after 2 years of experience on Facebook are very positive. They indicate that the Actas page has managed to attract a growing number of regular users, with an average gain of 16.6 new followers each month and stable growth in Spain and elsewhere. Furthermore, Actas has established an innovative presence in the web 2.0 environment and is in the vanguard group of dermatology journals with an international presence on the social networks. However, the intelligent use of this and the other social networks now used by Actas requires continuous feedback on the type of content that is really of interest to our users and can capture the attention of the journal's target audience.