While the COVID-19 pandemic has limited face-to-face interactions, social media has proven valuable in fostering and maintaining relationships. Academic urology has embraced Twitter to enhance communication and program reputation [1], [2], [3]. With the isolating events of the pandemic, the aim of this study was to re-examine the presence of urology programs on Twitter. We hypothesized that engagement with urology residency programs would increase during 2020 compared to previous years (2009–2019).
We identified Twitter handles for 113/131 US academic urology programs listed on the American Urological Association website, and extracted 83 000 tweets from 2009–2020 through the application programming interface on April 2, 2021 using Python. Natural language processing (NLP) was used for sentiment analysis, and classified as positive, negative, or neutral. Metrics such as number of tweets, hashtags, @mentions, and account creations including timing were compared.
Figure 1 displays trends and characteristics of the academic urology programs. When assessing temporal trends, 2020 represented a significant increase in both program tweets and account creation. Compared to prior years, the number of tweets increased (from 62 in 2009 to 18 397 in 2019 and 22 544 in 2020). Furthermore, 23 urology programs created accounts in 2020, representing the single largest increase since 2009. Most programs (13/23, 57%) joined Twitter between May and June, with additional 7/23 (30%) between July and August 2020 (Supplementary material).
Fig. 1.
Tweet performance dashboard for academic urology programs and analysis before and after 2020.
Sentiment analysis in 2020 revealed 43% positive, 49% neutral, and 8% negative sentiments across tweets. Interestingly, the positive sentiment percentage increased in 2020 (41% to 43%). Word cloud analysis, a visual representation of word frequency, revealed “urology” and “resident” as the most frequently utilized in 2020, compared to “urology” and “cancer” before 2020. While @americanurological remained the most frequently utilized mention in 2020, @uro_res surpassed @umichurology, as well as the recently introduced @uroresidency.
Trigram (three-word combination) analysis for 2020 revealed a shift from a primary focus on oncology (“risk, prostate, cancer” and “cancer, awareness, month”) to recruitment and education (“virtual, open, house” and “urology, grand, rounds”) in 2020.
Across all programs, the median (interquartile range) number of tweets, followers, following, and likes was 1748 (872–3051), 2201 (1509–3956), 801 (307–1198), and 3 (0–3), respectively. University of North Carolina (n = 8707), University of Southern California (n = 5480), and Cook County (n = 4299) had the highest average number of tweets. Academic accounts with the most followers were Johns Hopkins (n = 5365), New York University (n = 4882), and University of Michigan (n = 4396).
Our comprehensive, novel analysis convincingly demonstrates that academic urology is expanding Twitter use in response to COVID-19. Twitter has become the academic marketing strategy, boosting conversations and distributing program-specific content globally. Twitter has allowed urology applicants to converse with program directors, residents, and educators when many classically in-person events such as away rotations and residency interviews were paused. Programs and trainees have successfully established their own personal brands, building name recognition. Our findings depict 2020 as a unique crisis shaping social media use. For most urology programs, it was marked by an increase in tweets and virtual recruitment efforts. COVID-19 has altered the landscape of academic urology, with Twitter spearheading an expansion that will permeate all aspects of the field.
Conflicts of interest: The authors have nothing to disclose.
Footnotes
Supplementary material related to this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eururo.2021.05.002.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
The following is Supplementary data to this article:
References
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