As those of you who follow me on twitter know, I’ve been live-tweeting the American Elasmobranch Society conference. The meeting is the largest gathering of shark, skate and ray scientists in the world, and provided lots of opportunities to share interesting shark science and conservation news to my followers. In case you missed it, all the sessions are now Storify-ed and stored here on the blog (Plenary address, Biology and Conservation of Rays Symposium, Ecology and Conservation, Best Student Presentation/Gruber Award talks , and Physiology Behavior and Genetics).
Mary Canady of Comprendia was kind enough to compile some technical statistics on the use of the conference hashtags (#AES2013 for the American Elasmobranch Society portion of the meeting, #JMIH13 for the overall Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists). Thanks, Mary!
Between July 8th and today, there have been 1,568 unique #AES2013 tweets. Approximately half of the #AES2013 have been re-tweeted. There were 218 unique twitter users that tweeted at least one #AES2013 tweet (including RT-ing). There were approximately 10 AES members present at the meeting who tweeted at least once, including several who created a twitter account at the meeting. At least 6 AES members who were not present at the meeting followed along from home using twitter. We also took questions from twitter during the expert panel discussion at the ray symposium. For those of you not familiar with online altmetric speak, this can be summarized as “a very high level of audience engagement and interaction.”
In comparison, #JMIH13 had 1,602 unique tweets- only a handful more despite the fact that AES is a relatively small component of the overall JMIH. There were 88 unique twitter users who tweeted at least one #JMIH13 tweet, and about 1/3 of total tweets were RT-ed.
Finally, I asked the people following along on twitter to tell me a little about themselves. Here are their responses.