Social media ambassadors and collaboration with OncoAlert: a European Network of Young Gynae Oncologists study of comparative Twitter analysis of #ESGO2021 and #ESGO2022

Abstract

Objective The primary objective was to reveal the impact of social media ambassadors and the collaboration between the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology (ESGO) and the OncoAlert Network on Twitter during the ESGO 2022 Congress by comparing it with the ESGO 2021 Congress. We also aimed to share our experience on how to organize a social media ambassador program and evaluate the potential benefits for the society and the ambassadors. Methods We defined the impact as promoting the congress, sharing the knowledge, change in follower count, and change in tweet, retweet, and reply counts. We used the Academic Track Twitter Application Programming Interface to retrieve data from ESGO 2021 and ESGO 2022. We used the keywords of ESGO2021 and ESGO2022 to retrieve data for each of the conferences. The time range in our study captured interactions from before, during, and after conferences. We collected the ambassadors', ESGO's, and the European Network of Young Gynae Oncologists' (ENYGO's) follower data on Twitter from November 2021 to November 2022 for comparative analysis. Results There was a 7.23-fold increase in the use of the official congress hashtag in 2022 compared with 2021. Compared with #ESGO2021 data, the main interventions of the Social Media Ambassadors and OncoAlert partnership determined 7.79-, 17.36-, 5.50-, 10.58-, and 8.50-fold increases with #ESGO2022 data in the mentions, mentions in retweet, tweet, retweet, and replies, respectively. Similarly, all other most commonly used hashtags in the top 10 list indicated a range from 2.56- to 7.00-fold increase. Compared to the ESGO 2021 congress month, ESGO and the majority (83.3%, n=5) of ambassadors gained more followers during ESGO 2022 congress month. Conclusions An official social media ambassadors program and collaboration with influential accounts in the field of interest are beneficial for congress-related engagement on a social media platform (Twitter). Individuals participating in the program can also benefit from gaining higher visibility among specific audience.