Why I Tweet My Presentations

@JBBC @endocrine_witch I often livetweet my talks using Tweetdeck – @colleen_young taught me how

— Pat Rich (@cmaer) October 11, 2014

@JBBC @endocrine_witch I often livetweet my talks using Tweetdeck – @colleen_young taught me how

— Pat Rich (@cmaer) October 11, 2014

@RonanTKavanagh I’m curious about what benefits are… Apart from clever:) @cmaer@JBBC@endocrine_witch@colleen_young

— AnneMarie Cunningham (@amcunningham) October 11, 2014

 

This conversation took place on Twitter over the weekend. It was impossible to answer in 140 characters.

I often schedule tweets to appear during my presentations. I primarily do this to give credit where credit is due, not to pick out key messages of my talks. The 140 character snippets of my talks that resonate I leave to the audience’s discretion to tweet or not. In fact, I like to see their interpretations of my presentation.

So what information do I schedule?

• References: My talks usually contain references to papers or articles. I tweet the references and include URLs to the PubMed abstract or full article. Where possible I include the Twitter handle of the authors of the article.
• People who inspire me: Often I gather information prior to my talks from my social network. If an idea came from someone else, I include an attribution to them in a tweet and include their Twitter handle.
• Further information: Sometimes presentations are only 10-20 minutes long. There’s always more indepth information that we can share. When limited in presentation time, I’ll write blogs expanding on points that I’d like to go deeper on. I schedule tweets to coincide with that part of my talk and refer the audience to the relevant blog post.
• Hashtags and people: If there are communities or thought leaders that I think my audience would be interested in, then I schedule tweets about them too.

Is this clever? I think so, but I also think it is useful to my audience. I believe in making it easy for people to find people and resources, to expand the networks of people who are interested in the things I’m interested in, and most of all, to give credit where credit is due.

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