H. J. Logghe7, J. W. Suliburk5, A. Cochran4, N. J. Gusani1, L. S. Kao5, B. C. Nwomeh6, C. D. Jones2 1Penn State Hershey Medical Center,York, PA, USA 2Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Baltimore, MD, USA 3Baylor College Of Medicine,Baltimore, MD, USA 4University Of Utah,Salt Lake City, UT, USA 5University Of Texas Health Science Center At Houston,Houston, TX, USA 6Nationwide Children’s Hospital,Columbus, OH, USA 7Allies For Health,Reno, NV, USA
Introduction: Social media coverage of academic conferences has rapidly evolved from a novelty to an expectation. The first peer-reviewed publication describing the use of Twitter at a major surgical meeting reported tweeting about the 2013 Academic Surgical Congress (ASC), including quantification of posts and retweets. To evaluate the expansion of social media in a similar setting, the current study seeks to quantify the Twitter activity surrounding the 2016 and 2017 ASC and to compare findings to those of the previous work.
Methods: Evaluation of tweets about the 2016 and 2017 ASC was designed to replicate the methods used in the 2013 study wherever possible. Tweets including the #ASC2016 and #ASC2017 hashtags were prospectively gathered using the Symplur Healthcare Hashtag Project and descriptive statistics were obtained for tweets posted from 1 day before to 1 day following the conference. Based on the prior categorization of 2013 tweets, power analysis was performed (α=0.05, β=0.2) to detect a small difference in proportions of tweets in each category (352). Thus, a random sample of 400 #ASC2016 tweets was obtained and manually categorized to one of four categories to compare the proportions of tweets in the same categories between 2013 and 2016 (the most recent year for which complete data was available).
Results: In combined original and retweet analysis, there were 6,288 tweets from #ASC2016 and 11,521 tweets from #ASC2017, representing 14 and 27-fold increases from 2013 respectively (443 #ASC2013 tweets). These were posted respectively by 1,089 and 2,108 participants, up from 58 in the original study, representing 19 and 36-fold increases. While 4 individuals (a designated “Twitter team”) posted 56% of all tweets in 2013, the top 4 posters in 2017 were responsible for only 16% (1835/11521) of tweets. Of the 334 random #ASC2016 tweets categorized, 184 (55%) were related to content of sessions, 85 (25%) were promotional, and 53 (16%) were social in nature, statistically significantly more containing research content (p<0.01) and less containing promotional content (p=0.01) in 2016 than in 2013. (Figure)
Conclusion: Live tweeting of the Academic Surgical Congress has evolved quickly from the product of a small team of users to a crowdsourced effort, while increasing the proportion of tweets reflective of session content. Live tweeting of this surgical conference demonstrates an improved ability to share knowledge and promote academic activity beyond the physical confines of the meeting. Social media’s use related to academic conferences should be considered integral to the mission of knowledge distribution.
