Twitter Activity at HIMSS12

As most of you know, I wrote about my “Social Media Day at HIMSS 2012” over on EMR and HIPAA. There’s little doubt that social media was a huge part of my HIMSS experience. In fact, quite frankly, social media is a big part of pretty much every conference I attend these days.

One thing became abundantly clear during my use of social media at and before HIMSS. One of the very best uses of social media is to connect people or as one person once told (or likely tweeted) me “Twitter takes out that awkward first time meeting barrier.” It’s amazingly true how much easier it is for me to go up and meet someone who I’ve already interacted with on Twitter. At least then I have at a minimum a little bit of background and at a maximum I’ve shared multiple deep interactions over a long period of time across the spectrum of social media.

Although, I must admit that despite my love of Twitter, I honestly didn’t use Twitter all that much mid-conference. I was too busy meeting with people (many of whom I’d connected with before the conference on Twitter). So, I was surprised when I got the following tweet:

The link takes you to a view of the #HIMSS12 twitter traffic using a service called tweetreach. The most interesting numbers for me are that it shows the #HIMSS12 Twitter tag reached 288,980 people with 2,589,816 impressions. Then, it lists the top contributions to the reach on Twitter during HIMSS. It lists @ehrandhit with 428,222 impressions (@techguy had 19,589). That means I created 17.3% of all the Twitter impressions for HIMSS that it tracked. Not too bad.

I’m sure these numbers can be massaged a lot of different ways, but I find them quite interesting. It’s particularly interesting since I was often too busy (sadly) to tweet. Although, I did have a couple sprints during the #HITsm tweetup and a few of the keynote sessions.

No matter how you tag it, new ways for technology to bring people together are here to stay.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Awesome! how many unique viewers?

    IE if person A has 2000 followers and another one has 3000 but most of the first follow the second how many unique viewers?

    It seems like many of the people at HIMSS were tweeting talking to themselves..We were there and didn’t tweet once nor did anyone in our circle of booths.

  • PaloAltoDoc,
    It’s a good question that I’m not sure anyone has the exact answer to. The tool says, “288,980 people with 2,589,816 impressions” The people number comes closer to what you’re describing.

    Of course, there were a large number of people that saw tweets that weren’t at HIMSS as well. I know I interacted with a large number of people that couldn’t be at HIMSS, but appreciated the tweets as a way for them to participate from afar.

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