Muaataz Azawi, MD
Astoria, New York
Muaataz Azawi, MD1, Kavitha Vijayasekar, MD2, Maher Homsi, MD3, Manar Alwan4, Umer Syed, MD2, Aaron Walfish, MD2
1Elmhurst Hospital Center, Astoria, NY; 2Elmhurst Hospital Center, Elmhurst, NY; 3University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; 4Damascus University, Damascus, Dimashq, Syria
Introduction: The DDW is an international gathering of physicians around the globe in the fields of GI. Collectively sponsored by few of the largest GI societies. Nowadays, social media is widely used to deliver information and business marketing. Twitter is a social network site that rapidly gained worldwide popularity. With over 300 million users, and over 500 million Tweets sent daily, there is a great opportunity to spread ideas to a global audience. In this study, we are aiming to analyze the use of Twitter during DDW.
Methods: The Symplur Signals, a specialized healthcare social media analytics platform was used to analyse the hashtag #DDW19, the official hashtag of the DDW 2019 meeting. The analysis was conducted on tweets during the meeting days between May 18-21, 2019. The number of tweets, participants, impressions, average tweets per hour and average tweets per participant was determined. Advanced search on Twitter was also conducted using the hashtag #DDW19 with time frame between May 18-21. The resulted tweets were sorted by category “top tweets”. The top 50 tweets were categorized by content to scientific, social, administrative, industry promotion, or irrelevant.
Results: DDW 2019 had over 14,000 attendees from around the world. The number of people who participated in the hashtag #DDW was 3,924 (28% of the attendees) sending 15,350 tweets during the meeting days, with an average of 4 tweets per participant and 160 tweets/hour, leaving 71.594 million impression. The hashtag activity reached a peak of 4,815 tweets on the 2nd day of the meeting, May 19th. 60% of the top tweets were from physicians, 10% by medical journalist, and 30% by medical society/organizations. 42% of the top 50 tweets had social content such as group photos or appreciation of other presenters. Whereas 40% were scientific content. However administrative tweets were 10%. Only 8% of content was industrial promotions. There were no irrelevant tweets.
Discussion: Social Media has become the most effective medium to reach an enormous audience. With over 71 Million impressions produced during the recent DDW. Twitter has successfully promoted the event worldwide and disseminated medical information in a quick and cost-effective method. It has communicated to millions of individuals, including non-medical professionals, in a way that is difficult for traditional media sources to achieve. In order to create a more informative and influential post, it is encouraged that users tweet more on scientific and medical contents.
Citation: Muaataz Azawi, MD; Kavitha Vijayasekar, MD; Maher Homsi, MD; Manar Alwan; Umer Syed, MD; Aaron Walfish, MD. P0779 - TWEETING THE MEETING: ANALYSIS OF TWITTER USE DURING THE DIGESTIVE DISEASE WEEK DDW 2019. Program No. P0779. ACG 2019 Annual Scientific Meeting Abstracts. San Antonio, Texas: American College of Gastroenterology.