A Guide to Using Twitter @ Academic Conferences

As more and more academics, particularly those in the healthcare sector, take to Twitter to discuss their work, it seems like a good time to share some guidelines for making the best use of Twitter in that most hectic of intellectual and professional environments: the annual conference. Academic conferences are a great opportunity for networking, catching up on the latest developments in your field, and being exposed to new research and path-breaking ideas, but it can sometimes seem like they just get bigger and bigger and bigger, thousand of attendees, with fifteen sessions going on concurrently at different ends of a freezing cold conference center the size of a small central European nation. Twitter can be a useful tool for navigating these events – hearing about particularly intriguing sessions, meeting new colleagues, following up discussions after a paper has been given. These guidelines aim to help academics make the most of Twitter at conferences:

1) Find out the #hashtag: Then you can use your app of choice (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite etc.) to curate a feed/column dedicated to tweets about the conference. Once upon a time #hashtags developed organically, but these days you’re more likely to find them on the conference website. Speaking of which:

2) Follow the organisers: Few and far between is the academic conference now which does not have its own social media presence – typically running to a blog, a Facebook page and Twitter feed. Make sure you’re following the conference’s officially twitter feed – 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. On which note:

3) Follow other attendees: Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many academics spend conference tweeting into the void. the best way to find out who is going to the conference is to check who’s following the conference’s official twitter feed – follow them, too, and the likelihood is that they’ll follow you back (at least if they’re following this guide!). 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. Which reminds me:

4) 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:

5) 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:

• Live tweeting a session / paper
• Continuing a discussion after a session / paper finishes
• Asking for / giving advice about sessions / papers worth attending

All of which are great – but there’s one thing you really need to remember:

6) 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.

If your tweets show KUDOS, we usually find that they get plenty of retweets and generate lots of new followers. But remember:

7) 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.

8 ) 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 next set of attendees has piled in to the registration booth.  This way, academics can foster a social media community for the discussion of ideas – a community that can meet again next year, when the 2012 conference season begins.