APMA News - May/June 2018 - 15

The Importance of Social Media Adoption in Podiatry

Twitter for Medical Conferences
The second study looked at trends in Twitter use specifically
at our professional gatherings. We looked at Twitter use at the
APMA Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) from 2010 to 2016
with comparison to other foot and ankle or podiatric societies
(e.g., the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons Annual
Scientific Conference and the American Orthopaedic Foot and
Ankle Surgeons Annual Meeting) during the same timeframe. A
Twitter advanced hashtag search was performed for the years
in which the officially promoted conference hashtag by APMA
for the ASM was used, ranging from the first to last day of the
published conference dates, and the number of tweets was
counted and reported. (See Table 3 on page 16.)
Other specialties have witnessed a much higher number of
tweets around their meetings. The American Society of Clinical
Oncology (ASCO) found an 83-percent increase in number of
tweets and a 2.4-fold increase in physician Twitter use be-

tween the 2010 and 2011 meetings, while both the
American Urological Association (AUA) and Canadian Urological Association national meetings between 2012 and 2013 found a 5-fold increase in
number of tweets and number of urologists contributing online.2 #AUA15, the official hashtag for the AUA
(@AmerUrolgical, 16,000 followers) Annual Meeting
2015 had 13,933 mentions. Yearly growth from 2011
to 2015 increased exponentially from 12 in 2011 to 93 in 2012
to 3,990 (2013); 9,938 (2014); and 13,933 (2015). It should
be acknowledged that ASCO and AUA are large organizations
of 45,000 and 21,000 members, respectively, and both host
significantly larger meetings than any of the foot and ankle
meetings examined here. Although APMA's Annual Scientific
Meeting outperformed other foot and ankle conferences,
the raw number of conference hashtag tweets was low across
the board.
continued on page 16

TABLE 2
Podiatric State Association Social Media Use
State

Username (@)

TW Link on Website

Other SM

Arizona

none

no

FB

California

CPMATweets

YES

FB, TW, IG

Florida

FPMAtweets

YES

FB, TW, PIN, IG, YT, LIN

Idaho

idpodiatrists

no

none

Illinois

IPMA

YES

FB

Iowa

IowaPodiatry

YES

FB, TW, LIN

Maine

Maine_Podiatry

YES

FB, TW

Maryland

MarylandPo7dia

no

none

Massachusetts

masspodiatrists

YES

FB, TW, PIN

Minnesota

MNpodiatrists

YES

FB, TW, LIN

New Hampshire

NHPMA

YES

FB, TW, YT

New York

theNYSPMA

YES

FB, TW, VM

North Carolina

NCFAStweets

YES

FB, TW, YT

Pennsylvania

PPMAssoc

no

FB, LIN

Texas

TPMAtweets

YES

FB, TW

Utah

none

YES^

FB, TW^, PIN

APMA

APMA

YES

FB, TW, LIN, PIN, YT

Abbreviations: Social media designations: Facebook (FB), Instagram (IG), LinkedIn (LIN), Pinterest (PIN), Twitter (TW), Vimeo (VM), and YouTube (YT).
The ^ denotes a Twitter account listed on association webpage that is a "deadlink."
APMA News May/June 2018

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