H. J. Logghe1, J. T. Adler2, M. A. Boeck3, S. B. Bryczkowski4, A. M. Ibrahim5, A. N. Kothari6, N. Nagarajan8, S. Scarlet1, L. V. Selby9, C. D. Jones7 1University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill,Department Of Surgery,Chapel Hill, NC, USA 2Massachusetts General Hospital,Boston, MA, USA 3New York Presbyterian Hospital,Columbia,New York, NY, USA 4Rutgers New Jersey Medical School,Newark, NJ, USA 5University Of Michigan,Ann Arbor, MI, USA 6Loyola University Medical Center,Hines, IL, USA 7Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Baltimore, MD, USA 8Brigham And Women’s Hospital,Boston, MA, USA 9University Of Colorado Denver,Aurora, CO, USA
Introduction: Twitter coverage of professional meetings is a novel method used by attendees to enhance the conference experience and to amplify professional education beyond the traditional audience. While previous articles have quantified the number of tweets, participants, and impressions during medical conferences, little is known about the audience reached by these tweets. The current study seeks to evaluate the audience reached by the 2016 Academic Surgical Congress (ASC).
Methods: Tweets which included the #ASC2016 hashtag were prospectively gathered using the Symplur Healthcare Hashtag Project. The top ten tweeters were determined by the number of tweets posted from 1 day before to 1 day after the conference. Follower profiles of the top ten tweeters were obtained from SimplyMeasured and analyzed for geographic location (as time zone) and profile text. Differences in location were analyzed to determine the geographic diversity of conference Twitter followers. Keyword analysis was performed to compare the profiles of followers who self-reported as surgeons to those who did not.
Results: There were 39,090 followers of the top ten tweeters with 21,880 unique followers, demonstrating significant overlap in individual followers. Among those users reporting time zones (12,077; 55%), 23 of the 24 standard time zones are represented. On review of individual profiles, 18% of followers contained a reference to surgery; 27% contained a reference to medicine or health but not surgery. Profile keywords were substantially different between those who did and did not identify as surgeons.
Conclusion: To our knowledge this study is the first analysis of Twitter users following the tweeters from a health care conference rather than of those making the posts. Only 18% of followers’ profiles contained a reference to surgery, suggesting the #ASC2016 readers included many users outside the surgical field. Furthermore, follower time zone distribution was diverse, representing followers from around the world. These findings suggest conference tweeting is an effective method to disseminate conference programming beyond the traditional audience to those outside the surgical field as well as to those unable to physically attend.