SAT-485 NEW METHODS OF CONFERENCE COVERAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA –DO THEY HELP INCREASE THE REACH?

Abstract

Over the past decade, there is an increase in the utilization of various Social Media (SoMe) platforms in disseminating & sharing information from medical conferences. Twitter’s popularity among nephrologists for this purpose is widespread. At the World Congress of Nephrology (WCN) in Mexico in April 2017, a SoMe Task Force was created by the International Society of Nephrology (ISN). One of the main objectives of this was a comprehensive coverage of the lectures & presentations shared via different SoMe platforms. In a similar manner, an ISN WCN SoMe Team was created to cover the World Congress of Nephrology in Melbourne in April 2019 to disseminate scientific info from the conference. The ISN WCN SoMe Team launched Poster Talks (PTs), where the Author gives a voice over describing the poster. Also, Visual Abstracts (VA) of posters/oral papers & live talks (Live VAs) were created. Interviews of speakers & poster presenters as well as live stream of late breaking clinical trial (LBCT) were additional distinctive methods adopted. This was the first time Facebook was used to extend an international nephrology conference’s reach & its own analytics were used. Twitter analysis of these newer methods were done using Symplur & NOD Analytics. Periscope and YouTube data was analyzed looking at interviews & how they impacted on information spread. Over 17000 tweets from the conference were accessed in 90 countries (see figure 1). There were 1943 unique participants. There were 34 video interviews - 25 poster interviews & 9 speaker interviews. An index for the quantity of education delivered during these interviews was created (see figure 2). 21 Poster Talks and 29 VAs were created, (21 poster VAs & 8 Live VAs). When compared, these new methods of coverage were accessed, retweeted and commented upon more frequently than traditional slide-based tweets. YouTube data analysis showed 696 unique viewers and 824 min watch time. Highest attention span was of 3:21. Facebook data analysis showed that the Social Media reach was 340K, with 1786 interactions, 30 shares & 1720 likes. Live stream data of LBCT showed 2713 playbacks with 587 peak concurrent viewers, 798 hours of total view time with an average session length of 17.6 min with participants from 59 countries tuning in, generating a volume of more than 7000 tweets.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT) The newer methods of Social Media information dissemination from Conferences namely Poster Talks, Interviews, Visual Abstracts, Late Breaking Clinical Trials - Live streams as well as adding Facebook and & Youtube as platforms of sharing, helped increase the interaction and & reach of the conference to a significant extent.