Twitter increasingly used to share urological meeting info

(HealthDay)—Twitter is utilized as a significant communication platform at urological meetings, according to a study published in the August issue of The Journal of Urology.

Rano Matta, M.D., from the University of Toronto, and colleagues analyzed publicly available tweets containing established meeting hashtags. Tweet content was categorized as informative (based on research presented at the conference) or uninformative (unrelated to presented data).

The researchers found that, of the 5,402 tweets during the combined 18 meeting days, 4,098 were original and 1,304 were rebroadcast prior tweets. Compared to the 2012 meeting, there was a large increase in Twitter use at the 2013 annual meetings (4,591 tweets from a total of 540 accounts in 2013 versus 811 tweets from 134 accounts in 2012). In 2013, urologists were responsible for the majority of tweets (60 percent). The number of informative tweets increased from 29 percent in 2012 to 41 percent at the 2013 meetings.

"This adjunct to traditional meeting activity merits the attention of urologists and the professional associations that host such meetings," the authors write.