16th European Health Forum Gastein 2013

The 16th Eurpoean Health Forum Gastein was held in early October 2013. As there is a huge amount of blogposts and downloadable pdfs of lectures this review concentrates on the Twitteractivities around the conference. The hashtag was #EHFG2013

As it is sometimes – and after five years on Twitter I must say – still a discussion – The value of Twitter on conferences is widely accepted in international conferences. Here in Austria things seems to evolve slower so we also had a lot of discussions around this topic. Should somebody tweet during presentation? Yes or no? Why not? Whats the difference between tweeting and writing down some notes on paper or on digital devices? And is it rude or ignorant to tweet during presentations? For further reading on this topic please go to this blogpost by Lorna Sixsmith or read the last #hcsmeu Chat about this topic

So here it is – some insights in the twitterstats – and, yes it sometimes was possible to follow a session whilest not beeing personally there.

A total number of 2196 Tweets was counted (22.9. – 6.10.2013)

Number of Links: 672

Number of Retweets (RT): 887

A total number of 366 Twitteraccounts contributed to the #ehfg2013 Hashtag

This means that some of the audience tweeting on the Hashtag isnt personally there – just following online or commenting on a specific tweet. An Example:

Forum 1 (2-3 Oct) congress centre 2: iPads available for every participant. Share your opinions on mental health through the iPads #EHFG2013

— GasteinForum (@GasteinForum) October 2, 2013

The Answer of @kgapo:

@GasteinForum great social initiative! #EHFG2013 #hcsmeu — Kathi Apostolidis (@kgapo) October 2, 2013

@kgapo thank you — GasteinForum (@GasteinForum) October 2, 2013

Mostly active tweeps

No. means numbers of Tweets within the period – here the conference time.

@’s means how often this account was directly addressed by other tweeps

RT means how often this account was Retweeted by others

Content, Oranisationals and Socializing

A content analysis by tagging three different types of tweets shows that 3/4 (75%) of tweets are related to the content of the listened presentations and given comments on it. A low number of 10 % of tweets are organisational tweets, i.e. which presentation is next and some but not many advertisement tweets from media partners or companies. 16 % of Tweets are personal socializing tweets such as meeting points, weather tweets, conversations between tweeps about the programm and so on.

To sum up, this conference tweets are highly related to the content and it was quite easy to follow also from outside whats going on at the conference. This is in contrast to a lot of other international conferences where advertisement and orgatweets are prevalencing content tweets.