Introduction:
Women in Nephrology India (WIN-I) has taken its inception in the year 2021. There has been remarkable expansion of the organization since then with the formation of 9 state chapters. The first national conference was organized by WIN India in August 2022.The first conference was WIN ICON 2022, hosted by the central team, in the city of Hyderabad followed by WIN ICON 2023 and WIN ICON 2024 spearheaded by jubilant WIN Karnataka and WIN Kerala chapters. All the WIN ICON conferences were endorsed by the International Society of Nephrology.Though there exists umpteen number of social media platforms, it is equally essential that our target professionals are active on the platform for the appropriate reach. Prior to these conferences, a social media committee was formed ad hoc, with the dynamic and zealous nephrologists and nephrology residents to develop a structured plan with the goal of enhancing social media engagement at the conference
Methods:
An analysis of the reach was calculated based on number of tweets, retweets, impressions, likes and shares of the preconference, in conference and post conference posts on the various social media platforms.
Results:
Social media team grew in numbers from WIN ICON 2022 to WIN ICON 2024. Twitter and YouTube were predominantly utilized for social media coverage for the first 2 conferences. For the third annual conference of WIN ICON 2024, we put our foot on LinkedIn and Facebook. For the first conference, WIN ICON 2022, which was hybrid mode conference, #WINICON 2022 was used as hashtag and using this hashtag we analyzed that there were around 80 engagements on the tweets with a reach of 13186 and 16.184 impressions. Pre congress workshop on genetics and kidney disease had 108 views, day 1 conference had 346 views, day 2 conference had 727 views on YouTube. #WINICON 2023 was official hashtag for second annual conference and welcome video was a huge hit, bragging 240 views which absolutely showed a huge positive impact on the delegates attending the conference. Preconference interviews with esteemed international faculty was another crowd puller as reflected in around 715 views and 22 likes on you tube. Day 1 of the conference had 379 views, day 2 had 194 views on you tube . On twitter #WINICON 2023 had 119 engagements with 46,215 reach and 87,037 impressions. #WINICON 2024 social media coverage showed the total number of posts on X were 627 with approximately 100 users. All these cumulated to 12,90,927 impressions and reach of 1,81,009. A total of 79 posts were shared on Facebook. This included posts from the official Win icon account, WIN-India account and personal accounts of the official #SoMe members. The posts garnered 1718 likes, 61 shares, 142 comments and 8006 video plays. In contrast, engagements this time on YouTube were relatively lower. A total of 12 videos were posted which included 6 pre-conference videos, 4 welcome videos, 1 video of the press meet and 1 video of 'welcome to WCN 25'. The total views were 607 with 21 likes. Five posts were shared on LinkedIn, which garnered 59 likes, 1 comment, 3 reposts and 2338 impressions.
Conclusions:
We saw a steep rise in the social media coverage from 2022 to 2024 and its impact on attendance to the conference Twitter and YouTube showed the highest impact on the conference attendance by facilitating the interaction with previously unknown people, opportunity for robust dialogue, and the ease on visual graphics and photos. The formation of a dedicated social media committee is an useful strategy that can provide substantial benefits.
I have no potential conflict of interest to disclose.
I did not use generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process.