The dramatic increase in social media in urology

Area of Science:

• Urology
• Medical Informatics
• Scientific Communication

Background:

• Social media platforms like Twitter are vital for rapid information dissemination.
• Conference-specific messaging, often via hashtags, is a common use of Twitter.
• Analyzing Twitter activity provides insights into scientific discourse at professional meetings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze and compare Twitter usage patterns at consecutive American Urological Association (AUA) and Canadian Urological Association (CUA) annual meetings.
• To assess the shift in author types and content informativeness of tweets related to these urological conferences.

Main Methods:

• Publicly available tweets with official meeting hashtags were collected from an online archive.
• Tweets were categorized by author type (e.g., urologists, analysts) and content (informative vs. uninformative).
• An established classification scheme was used to determine tweet informativeness based on presented research.

Main Results:

• A significant increase in Twitter activity was observed from 2012 to 2013, with 5,402 tweets analyzed across 18 meeting days.
• The primary authors shifted from biotechnology analysts in 2012 to urologists in 2013 (60% of tweets).
• The proportion of informative tweets rose from 29% in 2012 to 41% in 2013, indicating a greater focus on meeting data.

Conclusions:

• Twitter has become a significant communication channel for urological meetings.
• There was a dramatic increase in Twitter engagement between 2012 and 2013.
• Urologists are increasingly driving the conversation, focusing more on data presented at meetings, highlighting Twitter's value as a supplementary tool.