JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Official conference hashtags are commonly used to promote higher tweeting and, thus, more social media engagement by conference attendees. The reach and impact of a new hashtag during an oncology conference have yet to be studied. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conducts an annual global meeting, which was entirely virtual due to the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

Objective:

The study's objective was to assess the reach and impact of the new hashtags #goASCO2020 and #goASCO2021 in the ASCO 2020 and 2021 virtual conferences.

Methods:

A core team of authors created new hashtags (#goASCO20 and #goASCO21) for ASCO virtual conferences in 2020 and 2021, respectively. We retrieved data using the keywords #goASCO20 (for 2020) and #goASCO21 (for 2021), respectively, and the data were analyzed using social network analysis in the NodeXL software application.

Results:

The hashtags #goASCO20 and #goASCO21 had similar impacts on the social network. The results showed that the hashtag in 2020 had 150 vertices and 2519 total edges, and 2021 had 174 vertices and 2062 total edges. In addition, mentions and tweets between 2020 and 2021 were also similar. The circles representing different users were arranged in space in a more balanced way in 2021. The users who promoted #goASCO20 did not tend to respond to tweets but, in 2021, increased their response rate (75 times in 2020 vs. 360 times in 2021). This showed an increasing engagement over the subsequent year.

Conclusions:

Introducing a new hashtag similar to the official conference hashtag could focus discussion on a specific cancer subtype in heterogeneous oncology virtual meetings.