Healthcare Conference Best Practices
1. Be early, be first!
At the earliest opportunity make a decision on your hashtag and make it known. Participants are eager to start talking about your conference and they will create the hashtag for your conference if you have not already done it.
2. Create a unique, short and simple hashag
Follow these guidelines:
- Use your organization’s abbreviation. For example: #MGMA for Medical Group Management Association.
- For recurring conferences add 2 digits signifying the year. For example: #MGMA11 for the 2011 annual conference.
- Hashtag must be unique!
Check with the past: Search Healthcare Database
Check real-time usage: Search Real-time Twitter - Don’t use any special characters like “-“, use only alphabetic and numeric characters.
3 – Register your hashtag
Register your hashtag in our database and send out a few tweets publicizing the official hashtag for your conference. Make your hashtag know on your website and in your conference materials. Well done!
Why should our healthcare conference have a social media presence?
You will have a social media presence, whether you created it or not
Short answer, because it will benefit both you and your attendees. It will increase your reach and promote your name, messages, speakers and attendees. On another note, this is something that conferences actually cannot control. Your attendees or outside interests may already be tweeting about your healthcare conference. Like with many other brands and organizations, you will have a social media presence whether you want it or not. Your decision is simply if you want to shape how this conversation takes place or not.
Why is it important to take control of your healthcare conference’s social media presence?
Being late creates confusion and fragmentation
By taking control from an early stage you will be able to shape the early conversations and where they take place. A healthcare conference hashtag should be created early in the planning stage and made public as soon as possible. We have seen too many cases of conference organizers being too late with the hashtag creation and as a result finding themselves in a situation where there are multiple conflicting hashtags used for their conference created by multiple attendees. You do not want your conversations to be fragmented which only results in reduced reach and creates confusion among attendees.
