Twitter Interactions in the Era of the Virtual Academic Conference: A Comparison Between Years

Abstract

The goal of this study is to assess variations in interactions over social media at academic conferences when held onsite versus online. Here, Twitter activities from different years of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T AM) are analyzed and reported. Data elements of individual tweets were examined using both primary- and second-level analyses, showing overall participation levels and the number of actions across different variables. The activity level and relative impact on the overall results of users who appeared in both years emerged as a key finding. Twitter activities during both the 2018 (Vancouver) and 2020 (online) ASIS&T AM were collected and compared.

Keywords

• twitter
• analytics
• scholarly communication
• academic conferences