Background: The American Council of Education in Plastic Surgery (@ACEPSedu) social media aims to nurture academic plastic and reconstructive surgery (PRS) by highlighting pathways to residency, promoting an inclusive culture, and supporting prospective applicants through educational content. In 2025, @ACEPSedu launched pilot initiatives focusing on residents including a resident-facing fellowship education series, a Military PRS feature, and collaborations with a partnership with the Garnes Society and Women in Plastic Surgery. The purpose of this study was to evaluate early progress of these initiatives. Methods: Analytics were collected from Meta Business Suite between January and September 2025. Metrics included reach, views, likes, comments, shares, saves, follower growth, and demographic data (age, gender, location). Posts were categorized as initiative (fellowships, military, and WPS/Garnes collaboration) or non-initiative. Comparisons were performed using Welch’s t-tests and Cohen’s d to assess effect size. High-performing posts were further ranked relative to all @ACEPSedu content during the study period. Results: This year, @ACEPSedu generated 597,179 views, reached 45,180 accounts (5609 followers and 40,913 non-followers, +62.7% from last year), with 4857 content interactions (+100%) and 1662 new followers. 59.30% of our audience falls in the 25-34 age range, with even distribution of women (51.2%) and men (48.8%). 29.1% of our audience engaged from outside the United States (US). Our pilot fellowship series ranked among the highest-performing content. The craniofacial fellowship promotion was the top-viewed post and 6th most-viewed story, with a reach of 3867 and 147 interactions. The microsurgery fellowship promotion was the 8th most-viewed post and 2nd most-viewed story, with a reach of 6636 and 193 interactions. The Garnes Society collaborative reel achieved a top 5 overall reach, and the WPS collaboration and Military PRS feature demonstrated similarly strong engagement within their target demographics. Mean reach during initiative weeks was 1.20-fold higher than baseline posts (2,807 vs. 2,340; Welch’s t = 0.84, p = 0.42; Cohen’s d = 0.34, small effect). Conclusion: Based on these findings, the @ACEPSedu should continue to nurture collaboration with additional PRS societies. Given the predominant 25–34-year-old age group of our audience, and the strong response to the fellowship geared series, future efforts will continue to emphasize resident-facing educational programming and content. Although not statistically significant, initiative category posts demonstrated a strong trend toward higher reach. Therefore, we anticipate detecting significant effects with continued initiative programming. Future direction should prioritize equitable representation, add more residents’ engagement, highlight our collaboration with other societies and career opportunities that might not be as extensively represented without collaboration.
Devisetti et al. (Mon,) studied this question.