title: The dramatic increase in social media in urology.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Social media are established tools for rapid information dissemination to a broad audience. A major use has been the compilation of conference specific messaging known as tweets via preselected hashtags on Twitter. We analyzed Twitter use between consecutive years at the AUA (American Urological Association) and CUA (Canadian Urological Association) annual meetings.
  
  
  METHODS
  Publicly available tweets containing the established meeting hashtags were abstracted from an online archive. Tweets were categorized by author type and by content as informative (based on research presented at the conference) or uninformative (unrelated to presented data) according to an established classification scheme.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We analyzed 5,402 tweets during the combined 18 meeting days, of which 4,098 were original and 1,304 were rebroadcast prior tweets. There was a large increase in Twitter use at the 2013 annual meetings compared to the 2012 meetings (4,591 tweets from a total of 540 accounts vs 811 from 134). Biotechnology analysts represented the highest volume of tweets (226 or 28%) in 2012 but in 2013 this majority shifted to urologists (2,765 or 60%). Of the tweets 29% were categorized as informative in 2012, which increased to 41% at the 2013 meetings.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Twitter has emerged as a significant communication platform at urological meetings. Use increased dramatically between 2012 and 2013. Urologists have increasingly led this discussion with an increased focus on data arising from meeting proceedings. This adjunct to traditional meeting activity merits the attention of urologists and the professional associations that host such meetings.
authors.affiliation: Department of Urology, Queen's University, Kingston and Division of Urology, University of Toronto (RM), Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Rano
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Matta
authors.affiliation: Department of Urology, Queen's University, Kingston and Division of Urology, University of Toronto (RM), Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Doiron
authors.affiliation: Department of Urology, Queen's University, Kingston and Division of Urology, University of Toronto (RM), Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Electronic address: leveridm@kgh.kari.net.
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Leveridge
mesh_terms: D002170:Canada; D003226:Congresses as Topic; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012955:Societies, Medical; D014481:United States; D014572:Urology
keywords: congresses as topic; education; internet; medical; social media; urology