Background: The oncology community is embracing social media (SM) platforms like Twitter to gain exposure to research, to network, and to engage in real-time discussions. The emergence of SM activity around the ASCO annual meetings has dramatically increased over the past 5 years, with factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerating use of digital platforms. This growth in SM engagement within the oncology community has previously been presented by totaling the quantity of tweets within a given time frame. Here, we explore the impact of specific trends through impression data. Methods: To evaluate activity trends among certain oncology stakeholders, we utilized an SM analytics platform, Symplur, to conduct a content analysis around ASCO conferences (2016-2020) using hashtags (#ASCOyy) as the search criterion. We focused our analysis on trends in impressions, defined by the theoretical maximum number of Twitter users a given tweet could have directly reached in a follower's timeline. We gathered impressions data to quantitatively assess overall ASCO engagement and evaluate topics of interest, and to discover common ASCO themes and reach within specific stakeholder groups. Results: Our results show the largest increase in impressions was during #ASCO20, despite a plateauing effect seen in the actual number of tweets (Table). The cumulative number of impressions for #ASCO16 was 468.2 million compared with approximately 1.12 billion for #ASCO20. Differentiating this result from the number of tweets related to ASCO, there was stabilization in the absolute number from #ASCO17 onward. When compiling impressions by doctors and by patient advocates, a similar trend emerged, with the most impressions captured during #ASCO20 (Table). Conclusions:As SM use continues to expand in the oncology community, stakeholders have turned to their digital voice to express views and opinions. The impact of impressions versus absolute number of tweets will continue to grow with a stakeholder's follower count, thus building on the digital presence in oncology.
Impact of #ASCO Twitter impressions on the oncology community