Influence of social networks on congresses of urological societies and associations: Results of the 81th National Congress of the Spanish Urological Association

Objective: To measure social network activity during the 81th National Congress of the Spanish Urological Association (AEU) and to compare it with the activity during other congresses of national and international urological associations.

Material and methods: We designed and registered the official hashtag #AEU16 for the 81^th National Congress of the AEU on the Symplur website. The following measurements were recorded: number of participants, number of tweets, tweets by participant, tweets per hour and views.

Results: The number of participants in the social network activity during the congress was 207. The measurements of activity in Twitter consisted of a total of 1866 tweets, a mean rate of 16 tweets/h, 9 tweets per participant and 1,511,142 views. The activity during the international congresses is as follows: 2016 American Urological Association annual congress (views: 28,052,558), 2016 European Association of Urology annual congress (views: 13,915,994), 2016 Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand (views: 4,757,453), 2015 Société Internationale d'Urologie annual congress (views: 1,023,038). The activity during the national congresses was recorded as follows: 2016 Annual Conference of The British Association of Urological Surgeons (views: 2,518,880), 81th National Congress of the AEU (views: 1,511,142), 109th Congress of l'Association Française d'Urologie (views: 662,828), 67th German Congress of Urology (views: 167,347). We found 10 posts in Facebook and 2 communications via Periscope TV related to #AEU16.

Conclusions: The social network activity during the 81^th National Congress of the AEU was notable given the results of this study. The use of social networks has expanded among urological associations, congresses and meetings, giving them a global character.