The Dramatic Increase in Social Media in Urology

Abstract

Social media are established tools for rapid information dissemination to a broad audience. A major use has been the compilation of conference specific messaging known as tweets via preselected hashtags on Twitter. We analyzed Twitter use between consecutive years at the AUA (American Urological Association) and CUA (Canadian Urological Association) annual meetings. Publicly available tweets containing the established meeting hashtags were abstracted from an online archive. Tweets were categorized by author type and by content as informative (based on research presented at the conference) or uninformative (unrelated to presented data) according to an established classification scheme. We analyzed 5,402 tweets during the combined 18 meeting days, of which 4,098 were original and 1,304 were rebroadcast prior tweets. There was a large increase in Twitter use at the 2013 annual meetings compared to the 2012 meetings (4,591 tweets from a total of 540 accounts vs 811 from 134). Biotechnology analysts represented the highest volume of tweets (226 or 28%) in 2012 but in 2013 this majority shifted to urologists (2,765 or 60%). Of the tweets 29% were categorized as informative in 2012, which increased to 41% at the 2013 meetings. Twitter has emerged as a significant communication platform at urological meetings. Use increased dramatically between 2012 and 2013. Urologists have increasingly led this discussion with an increased focus on data arising from meeting proceedings. This adjunct to traditional meeting activity merits the attention of urologists and the professional associations that host such meetings.