Presenter Guide

Under the Peachtree Presenter Guide

500 Women Scientists – Atlanta Pod

Getting Started

We’re thrilled to help you get started on presenting on Twitter. The first thing you’ll need is a Twitter account if you don’t already have one – sign up at twitter.com. Our guide will assume that you have a basic familiarity with Twitter, but if you do not, no worries – check out this great guide to Twitter for scientists by Dan Quintana: https://t4scientists.com/

For our conference, you will need to make sure that your account is not set to private and that your tweets are not “protected” for the duration of the conference – the purpose of the conference is for you to share your work and for us to signal boost it, so your tweets need to be accessible to everyone to see.

How It’ll Work

At your assigned time, we’ll first introduce you via a tweet on our account, @ATL500WomenSci. Then, it’s your turn! You will be responsible for tweeting your presentation from your account, at a rate of about 1 tweet per minute for 10 minutes (we expect each presentation to consist of 8-10 tweets).

We (@ATL500WomenSci) will also retweet the FIRST tweet from your presentation and the resulting thread so that our followers can find it easily. Therefore, we highly recommend including an engaging title image with your first tweet (see below)!

Drafting Tweets

We highly recommend that you plan out your intended tweets prior to the start of your presentation slot using Word or similar. Please remember that Twitter limits tweets to 280 characters including spaces and hashtags.

As this is a conference geared toward a more general audience from a broad range of fields, try to limit jargon, or at least define words when it can’t be avoided. Clear data visualization can be a great tool as well – a well-crafted graph often says more than 280 characters can!

How to Present

Each presenter is allotted a 20 minute slot. Of those, 10 minutes are allotted for presenting your paper in 8-10 tweets at a rate of about 1 tweet per minute. Then, we leave 10 minutes open for attendees to ask questions by replying to your tweet thread.

- You should have 8 – 10 tweets for your presentation. These tweets can be text-based, image-based, or a combination. If links are appropriate, they are allowed as well.

- Your first tweet MUST include the conference hashtag, #ATLWomenSci2021 – we also recommend including #500WomenSci, #Atlanta, or #scicomm as space allows, or any hashtags specific to your field that you’d like to include.

- Your first tweet should include the title of your presentation, either in the text or as an engaging image.

- Your tweets should include a numbering system of some kind so that attendees are easily able to orient themselves. This can be done with a simple (1), (1/10), or (1/n) at the end of each tweet – remember that these will count toward your character limit, though.

- Your last tweet can include links to further reading or resources for our attendees to learn more (got a paper? – link it!)

Twitter Threading

Your presentation should be formatted as a single Twitter thread, which means that your tweets will all be linked from your first tweet. To create a Twitter thread:

1. Send your first Tweet at your designated time slot, including your talk title as an image, text, or both, and making sure to include desired hashtags (including the required #ATLWomenSci2021).

2. Then, on your timeline, click below that tweet on “Add another tweet” and enter your second tweet’s text, images, etc. Send it about a minute after your first tweet.

3. Continue adding tweets until you have tweeted all tweets/slides!

Accessibility – Making Images Accessible

We highly encourage presenters to think about using visualization as a tool – we’d love to see images and graphs demonstrating your research! However, we also encourage you to consider adding alternative text and descriptions to your images so that the information remains accessible to all. Twitter gives us the option to write a description of the images so the content is accessible to people who are visually impaired. You can find out how to do so here.

Interacting on Twitter

So you’ve tweeted your presentation – great! Now you get to answer questions from interested attendees on Twitter. We’ve allotted 10 minutes for you to respond to questions that might have been tweeted during your presentation. Because we have time scheduled for this, we recommend that you wait until this time period to reply to any questions, so that you do not become distracted during your allotted 10 minute presentation time.

The easiest way to answer a question will be to “reply” to their reply – click on the notification or the reply within your tweet thread, and you should see an input box to “Tweet your reply”. Answer their question there and click “Reply” to send!

More Questions? Still Intimidated?

Feel free to email us at atl500womensci@gmail.com (direct questions to Virginia Silvis or Meg Sosnowski), or DM us on Twitter at @ATL500WomenSci – we’re happy to help you craft a great presentation!