Best Practices for Tweeting at a Meeting – AACR Annual Meeting 2013
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Best Practices for Tweeting at a Meeting
As an advocate, AACR Annual Meeting 2013 attendees and non-attendees alike will look to your tweets as a valuable source of information about the meeting. Below are some best practices that will help you and your followers get the most out of your Twitter participation. (If you would like to also review the AACR’s public social media guidelines, see the Social Media Guidelines for AACR Conferences, located on the AACR website under the Public & Media tab, on the Social Media page.)
Hashtags
Before you send a tweet about a meeting, find out if the meeting has a designated hashtag. Including a meeting’s hashtag in your tweets will ensure that others following the meeting on Twitter will see your contributions to the conversation. The hashtag for the Annual Meeting is #AACR.
Photos
During any AACR meeting, the use of photographic or other recording devices is prohibited in all plenary and poster sessions. However, we encourage you to share pictures that will allow viewers to get a sense of your experiences at the meeting, such as backstage preparations, crowd shots or “slice of life” photos.
Live Tweets
Annual Meeting attendees are encouraged to write about the conference and what they are hearing and seeing, without sharing details of any data presented. Your reactions to presentations and other experiences at the meeting will be invaluable to the Twitter conversation; do not hesitate to send regular updates.
The frequency of your tweets is up to you. Keep in mind that anyone who follows you will see every tweet you send, and minute-by-minute updates will dominate your followers’ timelines. Try to strike a balance between sharing enough to give your followers a good sense of your perspective, and tweeting play-by-play updates on the meeting.
In its guide to live-tweeting, Twitter recommends tweeting in a manner that best suits your writing style:
Focus on the kind of tweets that only you can create. If you're tweeting an event, that could mean sharing your insider perspective, especially if you're behind the scenes or sitting in the audience yourself. You know your style and your strengths: will you simply report on what's happening or share strong opinions? Will you answer questions from your followers or keep it one-way? Will you play the role of the expert or the explorer? The key is to do what comes naturally to you.
Negative Tweets
Lively discussions from varied points of view are encouraged at the Annual Meeting. As a public forum, conversations on Twitter may sometimes have a negative or inflammatory tone. It is sometimes best to simply ignore these types of tweets, but under certain circumstances action may be necessary to diffuse a situation. In this case, it’s best to take the conversation offline or out of public view as soon as possible. Try sending the instigator a direct message, or invite the person to email you directly so you can work with him or her to get a better understanding of the situation.
The AACR Communications and Public Relations department will be monitoring #AACR and will respond to negative or inflammatory messages as needed.