The impact of a dedicated multidisciplinary social media team at a national critical care conference

Introduction: Social media is a powerful product of this generation. In the last five years alone the number of ‘tweets’ sent per day has increased by a factor of 100,000. 500 million ‘tweets’ are now sent per day. Using a designated twitter ‘hashtag’ allows a conference to promote interaction before during and after the event Aim: To assess the impact and reach of the annual Intensive Care Society (ICS) conference by instituting a dedicated social media (SoMe) team Method: A dedicated SoMe team, modelled with aim of representing the critical care multidisciplinary team, was set-up approximately one year in advance. The approach included early adoption of a single official hashtag which was registered with ‘Symplur’, an online platform that collates and provides analytics for hashtags. We integrated ‘twitter moderators’ into every session, live-streamed delegates’ tweets on screens, created real-time infographics on the talks and also used our hashtag to encourage attendance at networking/social events. We had facilities for creating live stream and recorded interviews with speakers. We also created daily ‘summing up’ videos which were uploaded across facebook, youtube, periscope and twitter. Results: The impact of a dedicated SoMe team: *The number of paying delegates to the conference was 1061 Conclusions: A multi-professional SoMe team significantly increased the impact and reach of a national intensive care conference in the UK. This approach could be adopted for other international conferences to share education, learning and involvement in the future.