Analyzing Twitter Conversations from Healthcare Conferences

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So far this year, over 400 healthcare conferences have registered their hashtag with Symplur. It’s an amazing number! We’ve commented on the growth of Twitter use in healthcare conferences in the past, and we plan to publish some more healthcare social media analytics in the time to come. Conference organizers register their hashtags with us for several reasons, awareness in the healthcare social media community and access to some basic analytics and Twitter transcripts.

Analytics are a lot of fun and we’ve observed much increased interest in what one can learn from these datasets that each conference leaves behind. From all the data we collect and analyze the question quickly becomes, “how can we present this data?” How to present the data is dependent on what questions you want answered and what story you want to tell, but the data is almost always presented in a visual form.

A static visualization of the past – Infographic from Doctors 2.0 & You in Paris

In this first blog post in this series we will look at one example of analyzing the Twitter conversations from a healthcare conference – a static visualization of the data from the past presented in an infographic form. Doctors 2.0 & You and Symplur have partnered for the promotion of advanced Twitter analytics in healthcare, we recently released the official infographic for the social analysis of the #doctors20 conference hashtag. See key finding and more information after the infographic.

We have witnessed a tipping point in 2012 for leading healthcare conferences like Doctors 2.0 & You where for the first time, the majority of a conference’s audience is not those physically present, but those who were socially present. Healthcare social media analysis is fundamentally changing how conferences think about who their audience is and how to best communicate and share the ideas presented by these great speakers.

Key Findings from this Healthcare Conference Study

• There were more virtual participants (592) than participants that were physically present at the location (400). This illustrates both the power of social media, and the powerful impact the thought-leaders at the Doctors 2.0 & You conference created as their ideas went viral across the globe.
• The 4,999 total tweets created significant awareness of the ideas shared by the presenters at the conference with a total of 11,969,612 potential impressions in Twitter users’ tweet streams.
• There was great diversity in languages used by the social participants with English, French and Spanish being the top three, followed by Dutch, Italian, and German.
• The second day of the conference created the highest volume of social conversations with a total of 2,858 tweets.
• The social peak of the conference took place at noon the second day when Jen Dyer MD, MPH (@endogoddess) presented on how mobile apps and social media can be a powerful way to improve health literacy. This hour alone generated over 500 tweets.
• The strength of the presenters and their ideas was clearly revealed in our analysis of who the influencers were. We analyzed the top 3 influencers by number of Twitter mentions and observed a great variety of new faces each morning and afternoon, suggesting a host of dynamic and diverse interests and points of view.
• Patients were strongly represented at the conference being one of the main segments or social influencers.
• Looking at the top 50 influencers, we found that Doctors made up the largest group (12). They were followed by Consultants (8), and Patients (7).
• From analyzing the hashtags used during the conference, we identified some of the main topics discussed including “Healthcare Social Media”, “Mobile Health”, “Pharma”, “ePatients” and “eHealth”.

On the Symplur & Doctors 2.0 & You Partnership

Denise Silber (@health20Paris), president of Basil Strategies, digital health consultancy, founder of Doctors 2.0 & You, and an eHealth pioneer recently stated that “Twitter has become an indispensable part of the Doctors 2.0 & You experience to connect the venue and the outside participants, to connect the people on the stage with the audience, and to pursue the conversation and analysis beyond the duration of the event. We are delighted to partner with Symplur for the benefit of our community.”

Thomas Lee (@tmlfox), partner at Symplur, added, “Beyond the fact that Doctors 2.0 & You has had a substantial off-site audience, is the evidence that this extended audience literally spans the globe. Event speakers have voices that clearly travel across former geographic and language barriers. And, perhaps most significant of all is how this added conference reach can become a catalyst that fuels ongoing interest and meaningful conversations into the future on the very topics that the conference is aiming to impact.”

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