Social media expands the reach of the 2017 ASC Annual Meeting

Social media includes electronic communications shared in virtual communities and networks. In recent years, medical professionals and trainees have used social media to promote medical education, networking, scientific communication, and more. This practice has grown in medicine in general, including in pathology and cytopathology. Twitter, a social media platform where users compose short “tweets,” is a popular platform for medical professionals, including “live-tweeting,” where users post real-time updates from a conference using a conference-specific hashtag. For the 65th ASC Annual Scientific Meeting, the hashtag #ASCyto17 was selected. The specific hashtag allows users to easily browse all of the tweets from the meeting, and additionally enables hashtag-specific analytic data via the Symplur Healthcare Hashtags Project. Over the 4 days of the meeting, there were over 6 million impressions (potential tweet-views) from #ASCyto17, from 2514 tweets generated by 285 unique participants. Tweets included sharing practice updates, cases from the Diagnostic Cytology Seminar, and “cell-fies” with friends and colleagues. Through social media, the reach of the ASC meeting was greatly expanded, with potential benefits to ASC members and non-members alike.