How are We Tweeting about Ourselves? Analysis of the Society For Vascular Surgery and Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Meetings
Dongjin Suh, BS, Wooyoung Yoon, BS, Kedar S. Lavingia, MD, Michael F. Amendola, MD, MEHP.
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
OBJECTIVES: Twitter is a popular social media platform used during national medical conferences to capture events, promote discussions and expand professional networks through postings of Tweets. This social activity is measured by engagement metrics which are comprised of a Tweets’ likes, replies and retweets. Subject matter is categorized by associated hashtags. The Society of Vascular Surgery (SVS) and the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) utilized unique hashtags on Twitter for their 2019 annual meetings, namely the SVS Annual Vascular Meeting (#VAM19) and SIR Annual Scientific Meeting (#SIRATX19). We hypothesize that there will be discrete differences in Twitter activity by these two procedural specialties.
METHODS: Tweets with “#VAM19” and “#SIR19ATX” 30 days before and after respective meetings were collected. The top 100 Tweets based on total likes from each meeting were analyzed including retweets, likes, replies and number of hashtags. Individual hashtags were further classified into one of 5 domains: specialty-identity, diversity, education, medical care, and procedures. Students t-test* and Fisher’s Exact** and were utilized.
RESULTS: A total of 362 and 1944 tweets were posted by 118 and 404 distinct users from VAM and SIR 2019 Annual meetings respectively. There was no statistical difference (p=0.83**) for Twitter users per attendee for VAM (118/1568 or 7.5%) and SIR (404/5232 or 7.7%) respectively. 
There was a statistically (p<0.0001*) higher mean number of hashtags per post for SIR (2.9 ± 1.9) compared to SVS (1.74 ± 1.2). 
CONCLUSIONS: Analysis of twitter activity centered around #VAM19 and #SIR19ATX indicates that tweets from the SIR annual meeting had significantly higher number of hashtags per post and received significantly greater number of likes, replies, and retweets than ones from the VAM. Tweets from the SIR annual meeting had significantly higher proportion of hashtags associated with specialty-identity, diversity, and education than tweets from the VAM. These data should encourage the SVS and its members to establish a more directed social media effort especially during national gatherings like the Annual Vascular Meeting.
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