Social media engagement amongst 2017 colorectal surgery Tripartite Meeting attendees: updates on contemporary social media use
Abstract
Aim
Engagement by medical professionals with social media (SM) is increasing. Variation is noted in engagement between SM platforms and between surgical specialities and geographical regions. We aimed to study SM engagement by colorectal surgeons attending an international conference.
Method
Surgeons were identified from the delegate list of the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons (ASCRS) and Tripartite Meeting (Seattle, Washington, USA). Delegates were searched on Twitter and LinkedIn for the presence of a matching profile. SM presence, activity, gender and geographical region were analysed.
Results
Two hundred and seventy (13.2%) surgeons had Twitter accounts and 994 (44.3%) had LinkedIn profiles. UK surgeons were more likely to be on Twitter than surgeons from elsewhere (23.4% vs 12.7%, P = 0.0072). Significant variation in SM membership between each geographical region was noted, with usage rates for Twitter of 18.1% in Europe, 14.4% in North America, 12.9% in South America, 4.3% in Oceania, 3.7% in Asia and 0% in Africa. A similar picture for LinkedIn is seen. The #ASCRS17 meeting saw the highest participation of users to date (979 participants, over 7000 individual tweets and nearly 14 million impressions).
Conclusion
SM engagement by colorectal surgeons continues to increase. Significant geographical variation is noted, suggesting that SM's unique potential for education and networking may not yet be widely appreciated globally. Future work should include further analysis into tweet contents to gain insights and optimize the use of SM as an educational adjunct.
Conflict of interest
RRWB owns the mobile app and social media company researchactive.com Ltd. He has received consultancy fees from a number of social media, publishers and medical device companies in the field of medical social media; none of these companies are named in the following paper nor had influence in its conception, production or analysis.
