It’s been about nine months since we did our initial report on the utilization of hashtags at life science conferences. Now that the spring 2012 conference ‘season’ is almost over, we wanted to look at Twitter conversations tracked by the hashtags for each event. By tabulating the number of Twitter status updates and comparing it to the total number of attendees, we find that between 3.5 and 12.5% of life science conference attendees Tweet about the event. Here we discuss the trends and factors which affect life science conference Twitter engagement with an eye towards improving communication, resulting in a better experience for all. We judged the amount of Twitter activity by looking at the number of attendees, the number of status updates or Tweets, and number Twitterers for five of the major life science conferences since November 2011. Some meetings (ASCB, SLAS) were not included in the analysis because their Tweet volume was much smaller. Additionally, conferences for the ‘uber engaged’ scientists such as ScienceOnline were not included as their stats would dwarf that of the ‘mainstream’ conferences. The results of these tabulations are shown in the table below. Conference No. Attendees No. Tweets % Attendees Tweeting Hashtag Listing
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A recent article from the Huffington Post states that social networks for scientists won’t work because there is no incentive from a career perspective. The piece focuses on ResearchGate and takes a stab at the Economist’s article about the community. Here at Comprendia, we’ve never advocated that Facebook should be recreated for scientists, as there are 700,000+ life science graduates in the US already using the application,* and they are likely already connected there to lab mates and colleagues. Rather, we should broaden our idea of the ‘social network’ to include any online community of scientists, not just those which are similar to Facebook. The value of social networks for scientists lies in faster access to information relevant to their research and the communities that are made more available by new tools. Here are 6 successful examples which can be used to understand scientific social communities. Facebook Pages & LinkedIn Groups. Scientists have used mailing lists and forums for years. Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups are a ’2.0′ version of them with the benefits of centralization and easier access to participants. Life science companies, most notably Life Technologies, have fostered social networks in the form of Facebook pages centered on
Read more →Yes, in fact, we are obsessed with Twitter hashtags, terms that are added to status updates surrounding a topic, event, or chat. They give insights into the discussions and trends by anyone on Twitter who wants to join in, and allow us to discover new people and ideas. We track all the life science hashtags we’ve found, with a bent towards the research tools area (e.g., non-FDA regulated products). We’ve analyzed the utilization of all hashtags in our compilation and have identified the top 10 in 2011 based on the number of Twitter status updates tagged with them. We’re also enamored with word clouds and have displayed them in a clickable image below linked to a Twitter search of the term, the largest words indicating the top hashtags in 2011 (note Twitter searches go back only 8 days, some links may give no results). We’ve listed the top ten in the table below. Note that this list is by no means perfect, we’ve tried our best to find all the life science hashtags, but may have missed a few, be sure to comment below if you’d like us to track others. Additionally, some topics may extend outside of life science,
Read more →A quick post regarding the hashtags and terms people are using to describe Google+, the new social network. We had problems deciding what to call the application in our recent post and decided to do an analysis, as we know that using the proper hashtag or term means more exposure. Using our social media monitoring tools, we did a ‘quick and dirty’ count of both the hashtags (terms prefixed with a “#”, used mostly on Twitter) and the terms used to describe the application. The charts are below, and you can see that #google+ and #googleplus are most popular hashtags, and Google+ and g+ are the terms used most often. Notice also that the volume for the terms is up to 40X that for the corresponding hashtag, and with the latter considered to be used for tips and by those who are more “serious” about a topic. Our suggestion? Stick with Google+ and #google+ but remember that the “+” is a special character and may be ‘lost in translation’ in cases such as RSS feeds, tags, etc. (e.g., notice that the “+”‘s have been removed from the permalink/URL when WordPress generated it from the title, and I am unable to
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