Your AWS/ACS Social Media Guide

14 Oct 2016

By the AWS Blog Subcommittee

We are looking forward to kicking off the Association of Women Surgeons Annual Meeting and American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress this weekend. This goes slightly above the twitter basics.  For beginners, we recommend you also check out some social media guidelines and best practices.

We cover some of the essentials of tweeting effectively during both conferences, but similar principles apply to other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.  Be sure to hashtag/selfie/share with our guide below!

Guidelines for Meeting Tweeting

  • Warn your followers at the start of a meeting

If you are going to be live tweeting a meeting, it is a good idea to let your followers know so they can mute you if need be, or at least have an idea of why you are tweeting so much in a short amount of time.

An example: Headed to #ACS2017 – planning on live tweeting – apologize in advance for the flurry of tweets for those not interested, feel free to mute.

Use the registered hashtag for the meeting so it ends up in the right place.  Symplur.com will have most of scientific meetings, you can also see the meeting stats there. Some upcoming meetings we hope you will consider tweeting about

  • #AWS2016 – The 2016 Association of Women Surgeons Annual Meeting
  • #ACSCC16 – The 2016 American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress
  1. Use Images to help to gain visibility – but if you take pictures make sure you can read a slide or see the speaker
  2. Try to summarize the findings, acknowledge the presenter (this can be done by tagging them using the @ sign-if it is at the start of a tweet use .@ or you tweet will only be visible to that person.
  3. If your reply is of general interest may be better to retweet and comment attached to a specific tweet from another user.

Again, here physicians (from med students to senior attendings), nurses, patients can all come together to talk about a topic on the same level.

Take Home Guidelines:

  1. It is okay to just “listen” or “lurk” – just type the name of the hashtag (eg. #AWS2016) in your twitter search bar or click on the hashtag of the conference you are interested in.
  2. Let your followers know you will be participating – a flurry of random tweets can annoy people unless they know why you are tweeting, they can be beneficial if it is a topic of interest to people who are following you.
  3. It is ok to have some pretyped tweets and send them at the appropriate time for a conference session.
  4. If you like other tweets retweet or like them.

A reminder.  Your tweets are searchable and generally not private, so do not post anything that you will regret later.  Be professional, do not give personal medical advice. It is ok to have a personal component to your tweets, just know that the world is watching.

Happy tweeting! We hope you join us at #AWS2016 in Washington D.C. this year!

This post was adapted from Dr. Heather Yeo’s guide to tweeting, previously featured on our blog. 

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