With the conference almost upon us I thought it'd be useful to share some guidelines for making best use of Twitter during the event.
Twitter can be a useful tool for navigating these events – hearing about particularly intriguing sessions, meeting new colleagues, following up discussions after a session has run. These guidelines aim to help delegates make the most of Twitter at the conference:
- #socitmspring: This is the hashtag that has been designated to 'tag' related tweets with throughout the conference. A simple search for this hashtag allows you to view all the tweets and conversations. Please remember to tag any tweets you make that are related with this hashtag!
- Follow the Organisers: It’s a good way of keeping up with all the housekeeping announcements. It also means that other conference attendees will see that you are following the conference and may follow you in return. (@socitm)
- Follow other attendees: Seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people spend a conference tweeting into the void. Don't be shy about reaching out to other attendees via twitter before the conference; it helps to establish you as a genuine voice in the conversation
- Tweet in advance: Don’t just turn up to the conversation when the conference starts; tweet in advance about, say, which sessions you’re looking forward to, publicity for your own session or paper, or – even better – to ask for advice about which sessions to attend. Having said that:
- Keep up the tweets: Try not to fall silent when the conference starts. It’s all too easy once the madness begins to stop tweeting and just attend ‘old school’ style. There’s three basic types of tweets during an academic conference:
- Continuing a discussion after a session
- Asking for / giving advice about sessions
- All of which are great – but there’s one thing you really need to remember:
- Add value! If you’re live tweeting, don’t just report verbatim – add opinion or questions or counter examples. Contribute your voice to the conversation, and remember the handy KUDOS framework for successful social media content like tweets:
- K – Knowledge: each tweet should be a piece of knowledge; a fact, a joke, an opinion.
- U – Useful: each piece of Knowledge should be useful to your audience, not just useful to you
- D – Desirable: each piece of Knowledge should be desirable; it should have something which sets it apart from all the other merely ‘useful’ tweets
- O – Open: be open and honest about who you are and which organisation you represent
- S – Shareable: your Knowledge should be shareable; things you’d be happy having attributed to you and which you want to be passed around.
- Relax: Just like you can't get to every session, you can’t follow every tweet, so don’t worry if you drop the twitter ball on occasion.
- Follow up: Once the conference is over, the conversation doesn’t need to be. Keep up with new followers and carry on talking about issues and ideas that interested you at the conference. One of the best things about social media is that it transcends temporal events like conferences, allowing us to carry on long after the event is over.
