Mental health nurses’ use of Twitter for professional purposes during conference participation using #acmhn2016

Abstract

Scholars across different disciplines use Twitter to promote research and to communicate with society. Most conferences nowadays have their unique hashtag in which participants can communicate in real time. Previous research has reported on conference participants' use of Twitter, but no such studies are available in the field of mental health nursing. Thus, the explicit aim of the present study was to examine conference participants' use of Twitter during the 42nd International Mental Health Nursing Conference. Freely-accessible data were mined via a social media platform under the hashtag #acmhn2016. The total dataset consisted of 1973 tweets, and was analysed with descriptive statistics and a directed content analysis. The results demonstrated that 37% of the tweets were original posts, and 63% were engagements. In total, 184 individual accounts engaged in Twitter during the conference, and 16.4 tweets were posted hourly. Most tweets were categorized as conference/session-related content, but Twitter was also used for socializing with other participants. The most frequently-used words mirror a clear connection to a person-centred approach, and deviate from the biomedical terminology. However, not all of the conference participants engaged on Twitter, and might thereby risk being excluded from this backchannel.

Conference Hashtags: A Case of #RTP18 – The 2018 Exercise and Sports Science Australia Conference

“…Compared to the most recent report of Twitter use by an Australian conference in the healthcare domain, the use of the conference hashtag was quite low. For example, at the 2016 Australian Conference of Mental Health Nursing (ACMHN), from over 300 conference delegates, 735 original tweets were identified across five days, including the three days of the conference and day preceding and following, with 95% (n = 698) of these occurring in the three days of the conference (5). However, in contrast to the ACMHN Conference, where the distribution of tweets was similar across the three conference days, the present study shows a decline in the number of original tweets across the three conference days.…”

“…Additionally, many health-related scientific conferences use event-specific hashtags to facilitate conference communications. A number of studies have examined the use of Twitter and event-specific hashtags in Australian (3)(4)(5) and internationally based conferences (6,7). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has examined hashtag use at conferences in the exercise physiology and exercise science disciplines.…”

COVID-19 Tweets of Governors and Health Experts

“…Outside of COVID-19, there is sparse research on Twitter as a healthcare communications venue for HEs. A few studies focus on tweeting during professional conferences (Salzmann-Erikson, 2017;Lemay et al, 2019;Ziemba et al, 2020), and one study that examined the #TipsForNewDocs hashtag (Rashid et al, 2018). Research on the differences in Republican and Democrat politicians are more plentiful.…”

Developing the social media presence of @NurseEducToday by using Twitter

“…Engagement by students (Price et al 2017, Booth, 2015 in Twitter Chats (Sinclair, McLoughlin, Warne, 2015). Conference networking/sharing using hashtags (Salzmann-Erikson, 2017).…”