Original article
Activity, content, contributors, and influencers of the twitter discussion on urologic oncology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urolonc.2016.02.021Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Tweet activity was significant with more than 100,000 tweets by 40,000 participants.

  • Awareness, cancer, and risk were the most frequently mentioned words in the tweets.

  • Contributors came from 41 countries on 6 continents.

  • Health care organizations accounted for the most of the top influencers in all cancers.

Abstract

Objectives

To analyse the activity, content, contributors, and influencers of the Twitter discussion on urologic oncology.

Materials and methods

We performed a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative Twitter analysis for the hashtags #prostatecancer, #bladdercancer, #kidneycancer, and #testicularcancer. Symplur was used to analyse activity over different time periods and the top influencers of the Twitter discussion. Tweet Archivist and Twitonomy analysis tools were used to assess characteristics of content and contributors.

Results

Twitter discussion on urologic oncology in 2014 contained 100,987 tweets created by 39,326 participants. Mean monthly tweet activity was 6,603±2,183 for #prostatecancer, 866±923 for #testicularcancer, 457±477 for #bladdercancer and 401±504 for #kidneycancer. Twitter activity increased by 41% in 2013 and by 122% in 2014. The content analysis detected awareness, cancer, and risk as frequently mentioned words in urologic oncology tweets. Prevalently used related hashtags were the general hashtag #cancer, awareness hashtags, and the respective cancer/urology tag ontology hashtags. Contributors originated from 41 countries on 6 continents and had a mean of 5,864±4,747 followers. They tweeted from platforms on exclusively mobile devices (39%) more frequently than from desktop devices (29%). Health care organizations accounted for 58% of the top influencers in all cancers. The largest proportion of physicians were among the #prostatecancer and #kidneycancer (each 9%) influencers and individual contributors were most frequent in the discussion on #kidneycancer (57%) and #testicularcancer (50%).

Conclusion

There is a significant and growing activity in the Twitter discussion on urologic oncology, particularly on #prostatecancer. The Twitter discussion is global, social, and mobile, and merits attention of stakeholders in health care as a promising communication tool.

Introduction

The microblogging social media platform Twitter is increasingly being adopted in the urological community. Meanwhile, several urological journals with the highest social media rankings (as measured by Klout scores), led by the BJUI and European Urology, use Twitter to interactively communicate with their readers and contributors [1]. Furthermore, 70% of the Australian and New Zealand urologists have a social media account, with Twitter being the second most common platform after LinkedIn [2]. Twitter has been recently considered beneficial for networking, disseminating information, research, career development, and advocacy by users during the 2014 European Association of Urology and American Urological Association annual meetings [3]. A paragon of the successful use of Twitter is the international urological journal club #iurojc, which included 189 unique participants around the globe contributing 2,345 tweets to a monthly scientific discussion of articles during the initial 12-month period [4]. To optimize organisation of the growing number of conversations about urological topics on Twitter, the Urology Tag Ontology Project has been initiated most recently [5].

Several studies have reported on the growing activity of the Twitter discussion at urological conferences [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. Importantly, these assessments represent only a snapshot of the dynamic interactive blogosphere and therefore, generalization of the results is rather limited. Thus, a comprehensive longitudinal assessment of the Twitter discussion is crucial to generate more robust data on qualitative and quantitative characteristics of its activity, content, contributors, and influencers. As urologic oncology is a pivotal and widely discussed domain in the urological health care [11], we sought to shed light on properties of the Twitter discussion on urologic oncology over a longer time period.

Section snippets

Material and methods

The most representative hashtags for urologic oncology were selected in the urology tag ontology list on Symplur [5]. We assessed the hashtags #prostatecancer, #bladdercancer, #kidneycancer, and #testicularcancer for which the tweet activity in 2014 outnumbered the sister hashtag (ending on “sm”) by factor 9 to 13. The #penilecancer discussion was excluded since tracking of #penilecancer tweets has only been started in July 2015 by Symplur. The flowchart in Fig. 1 depicts the scheme of the

Results

Table delineates the characteristics of the Twitter discussion in 2014 for the 4 most common urological cancers. Overall, there was an activity of more than 100,000 tweets created by roughly 40,000 participants. The #prostatecancer discussion largely outnumbered the other entities regarding participants, impressions, and tweets followed by #testicularcancer doubling, #bladdercancer, and #kidneycancer for the number of tweets and triply outmatching them for participants. Fig. 2 shows the monthly

Discussion

We performed a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis on the activity, content, contributors, and influencers of the Twitter discussion on urologic oncology. Twitter activity grew by 122% in 2014, was substantial with more than 100,000 tweets by roughly 40,000 participants, and largely dominated by the #prostatecancer discussion. The content analysis detected awareness, cancer, and risk as frequently mentioned words in the tweets. Contributors came from around the globe, had more

Conclusions

There is a significant and growing activity in the Twitter discussion on urologic oncology, particularly on #prostatecancer. The Twitter discussion is global, social, and mobile, and merits attention of stakeholders in health care as a promising communication tool.

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    Contributed equally as senior authors.

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