Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Statistical Analysis of Tweet Feeds from the 14th ANNUAL BIOTECH IN EUROPE FORUM For Global Partnering & Investment 9/30 – 10/1/2014 • Congress Center Basel – SACHS Associates, London

The advantages of conferences and meetings include discussion, presentation, and collaborative opportunity of new information which may be unavailable in traditional literature sources. These meeting and conferences have been crucial to the scientific and business discourse, leading to new collaborations, enhanced discovery, and provided platforms for young scientists and companies to publicize their work in an interactive forum. However, these advantages are mainly limited to meeting attendees, while feedback, collaboration, and meeting impact is difficult to assess.

Social media and the networks it creates have revolutionized scientific collaboration and discourse. The use of social media could greatly enhance and provide metrics for meeting engagement, feedback, and effect on professional networks. Here we describe results of meeting coverage of the Sachs Associates 14^th Global Biotech Partnering & Investment Forum using a methodology described in Methodology for Conference Coverage using Social Media. Briefly meeting notes are simultaneously posted on the site http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/ and the corresponding Twitter platform @pharma_BI, and coordinated with Sachs Associates meeting Twitter handle #Sachs14thBEF.  This integration of Twitter and web-based blogging platforms allow measurement of meeting attendant engagement and social media coverage impact.

Methods

Methodology for social meeting coverage had been described before in Methodology for Conference Coverage using Social Media. This methodology had been used for the previous Sachs Associates meeting held in Boston, MA in March 2014 however meeting and Twitter analytics had not been performed. For this conference, LPBI had actively monitored Tweets and web post views during and a week after the conference.

Pre-conference preparation

Pre-conference, a strategy was developed for meeting coverage including:

• Defining most popular # and @ to use for maximum Twitter following of individual Tweets. Developing a strategy pre-conference allowed for the rapid integration of appropriate Twitter handles for each presentation. The list of # and @ which were to be used was posted on our site http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/ before the meeting began.
• Posts for presentation notes were fashioned and saved in WordPress™ as drafts to allow for quick access, writing of meeting notes, editing, and posting to the web via WordPress™. In addition, post was pre-annotated with tags (for search engine optimization) and placed in appropriate categories for indexing in LPBI’s online journal.

• Description of Conference Coverage
• Post-Meeting Analytics of Social Media Metrics

Seven days after end of meeting, the online response to meeting presentations was determined by analyzing the Twitter and blogging activity related to the Forum. This was achieved by monitoring the meeting hashtag (#Sachs14thBEF), Twitter feeds related to the Sachs Associates (@SachsAssociates) Forum, Twitter activity from @pharma_BI (LBPI’s Twitter account) and web activity on http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/ , the WordPress site used to post meeting notes.

There were a total of 26 tweets from #Sachs14thBEF, 50 tweets from @pharma_BI, and 40 tweets originating from http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/ were collected. Over the week September 30, 2014 to October 7, 2014, there were 18 posts of meeting-notes put on the website www.pharmaceuticalintelligence. These posts were shared on LinkedIn groups as well as on Twitter and Google+. The collected Twitter and web activity were subjected to the following analyses:

1. Twitter Analytics Twitter feeds were collected from the three sources and analyzed using TweetReach™ (http://tweetreach.com/) analytic software.  The number of tweets and retweets were measured as well as the number of Impressions and Reach generated by each Twitter user. The software org was used to analyze the Twitter feeds form either of the three sources of meeting coverage to determine the tweeting habits of meeting attendants based on size of social media following.
2. WordPress Analytics Presentations notes were posted on http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/ by Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari on day of talk. Statistics of post views were obtained using WordPress™ Toolkit. The WordPress Stats plugin provides information such as daily views, site referrals, and site click-thru for each post. Below shows overall posting statistics for the LBPI site over the period September 30^th– October 7^th:

Site Statistics on Forum-Related Posts on LBPI website

3. Word-cloud Analysis – Meeting tweets were collected into Word and saved as a text file. The text file was edited to remove redundant phrases such as html code. The resultant text file was analyzed using the WordItOut™ program, available at http://worditout.com/ and a Word-Cloud was generated to determine common words, phrases.

Results

 PLEASE Click on Pictures For LARGER IMAGES

Figure 1. Impressions of Twitter feeds from meeting attendants and followers tweeting on different social platforms. Forum attendees tweeted on three different platforms: either using

• a web-based blogging environment for the Open Access Online Scientific Journal of Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI):  http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/
• the Twitter.com Page of LPBI covering the meeting @pharma_BI, or
• Sachs Associates special Twitter Hashtag  #Sachs14thBEF.

Twitter feeds were collected from the three sources and analyzed using TweetReach™ http://tweetreach.com/ analytic software.

• The number of tweets and retweets were measured, as well as
• the number of Impressions. and
• Reach generated by each Twitter user.

Note:

• the y-axis represent the number of tweets plus retweets by meeting or # followers, while
• SIZE of the bubble represents the IMPRESSIONS that user made with their tweets
• the largest bubble is from the user of @Roche.

Definitions:

• Reach is the total number of estimated unique Twitter users that tweets about the search term were delivered to.
• Exposure is the total number of times tweets about the search term were delivered to Twitter streams, or the number of overall potential impressions generated.
• “Impression”, we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. Not everyone who receives a tweet will read it, so you should consider this a measure of potential impressions. Both reach and impressions should be treated as directional metrics to give you an idea of the overall exposure the tracked term received, giving a sense of the size of potential audience and impact.

Figure 2. Tweeting habits of Twitter users may depend on size of Twitter following. The software hashtag.org was used to analyze the Twitter feeds form either of the three sources of meeting coverage.

The data was separated based on number of tweets by users who:

• have less than 100 followers,
• 100-999 Twitter followers,
• 1000 – 9,999 followers, or
• less than 100,000 followers.

Most who tweeted about the meeting had less than 1000 followers. HOWEVER there were some heavily-followed Twitter accounts who used the meeting hashtag #Sachs14thBEF.

Figure 3. Daily views of each post of meeting-notes from Forum presentations. Presentations notes were posted on http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/ by Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari on day of talk as soon as the presentation ended.

Statistics of post views were obtained using WordPress™ Toolkit. Different colored bars represent post views for the given day. Note the Oncology II presentation had 111 views form September 30^th-October 6^th. Certain talks were on day 2 of the Forum (October 1^st).

For data please click on Excel file below

sachs14globalbaselimpressions

Below is a WORDCLOUD generated from a curation of the meeting tweets on ALL platforms. Some interesting words reflected some common themes at the meeting including conundrums, concerns with partnering and access to investment as well as Issues regarding Collaborations and Venture Capital.

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