Abstract No. 463 Social media growth of annual medical society meetings: a comparative analysis of interventional radiology with other medical specialties

Abstract

To understand social media growth in interventional radiology (IR) compared to other related specialties by quantifying and comparing hashtag utilization at annual medical conferences. Official annual conference hashtags for SIR, RSNA, ACC, AHA, and ASCO were analyzed from 2015 to 2019, along with common IR tags #IRad and #FilterOUT. Twitter analytics, including engagement and activity metrics were obtained with the use of Symplur Signals, a health care social media analytics platform. Linear regression analysis was performed on the number of tweets and users for each hashtag to assess trends from 2015 to 2019. SIR tweets increased significantly at a rate of 1032.8 tweets/year (P = 0.008) while users also significantly grew at a rate of 212.5 users/years (P = 0.007). Linear regression established that #IRad tweets are growing at a rate of 18403.1 tweets/year (P = 0.011) while #IRad users are also growing at a rate of 1548.8 users/year (P = 0.003). Both of these rates demonstrated that #IRad is growing faster than SIR in both the number of tweets and users per year. Other conference hashtags were not found to trend significantly for tweets or users per year over the specified time period, except for a decrease in RSNA users at -1207.1 users/year (P = 0.018). No significant trends were found in the number of tweets per user for any of the hashtags studied. SIR was the only studied specialty conference that had statistically significant increases in the number of tweets and users. #IRad also had statistically significant increases in these metrics. This data suggests that the IR Twitter community has experienced robust growth relative to other specialties in social networking activities.