Twitter Impact On Healthcare Conferences (Infographic)

The Symplur blog and Healthcare conferences

I have been following the Symplur blog for a while, and they do some great things with tracking how Twitter works with Healthcare conferences, especially hashtags. Here are some findings from one of the conferences they tracked last year, the “Doctors 2.0 & You” conference that took place in Paris in May 2012. Essentially tracking conversations featuring the #doctors20 conference hashtag.

Some of the key Findings from the Symplur 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.
•    Patients were strongly represented at the conference being one of the main segments or social influencers.
•    Looking at the top 50 influencers, they 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, they identified some of the main topics discussed including “Healthcare Social Media”, “Mobile Health”, “Pharma”, “ePatients” and “eHealth”.

5 tips for enabling the social buzz at an event

Hashtags are not the only factor to enable effective social media buzz around a conference event. Here are four others;

1) Event hashtag
2) Reliable wireless network
3) Great content
4) Use a location based service like Foursquare to create a place for people to checking at your event.
5) Drive the back-channel conversation and display event hashtag tweets.