Tweet your meeting
Or, how embracing social media can make your meetings better.
While Tweeting and use of social media during meetings has become the bane of some employers’ lives – taking focus away from the task at hand – by embracing these new platforms you can improve the quality and outcomes of your meeting.
Here’s how:
1. Get ideas
The internet is jam packed full of great ideas and different ways of thinking but finding them or accessing them can sometimes be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. There are also a number of unreliable sites offering dubious advice.
This is where social media can come in. By putting a call out to your followers you can get some great ideas. Hopefully, the people who have chosen to follow you will understand what your company is about but will also be able to offer alternative angles and opinions.
2. Get the ball rolling
Once your meeting is planned, use social media to contact your employees and let them know. Set up a hash tag like #AGM2015 or #meetingofminds and make sure to include it any in any tweets about your meeting to drum up enthusiasm for the event.
You can also use social media to track who is coming and from where. If you’re holding a meeting at a different venue than your office, use Facebook to send a map along with ways to get there.
3. Connect with others
It might be that you’ve found a great statistic from a report to use in your meeting but would like some more information to back it up. Send a tweet out to the report author to get some unique insight into the figures.
You can also use social media to update potential attendees of the meeting on themes, dates, venues etc. This works particularly well for networking meetings or business breakfasts.
4. Share your ideas
Have a five minute break where everyone can Tweet what they’ve learned from the meeting. Keep track of who is tweeting what and take your cues for the second half of the meeting from there.
After the meeting, you can use social media to share your outcomes with others or simply update your client base on any decisions made.
For bigger meetings you could even encourage certain staff members to live Tweet what is happening. But do warn them not to Tweet confidential matters.
5. If you can’t beat them, join them
More and more people are Tweeting or updating Facebook throughout their working day – not because they have an urgent need to but because they can. Better they put that time towards something productive rather than pictures of kittens and motivational quotes.
