We run fortnightly #physiotalk tweet chats, and many of these are run by guest hosts or co-hosts – including students, associates, early career practitioners and patient representatives.
Hosting a #physiotalk is a great way to share your knowledge and explore a topic with peers. It also counts towards your CPD, and can help demonstrate the wider impact of social media skills.
This is a guide to what’s involved in hosting or co-hosting #physiotalk. Depending on how confident you feel the physiotalk team support you with planning, running and reviewing a #physiotalk twitter chat.
Planning
- Decide on a topic you think people will be interested in and that you would be confident to lead a chat on (you don’t need to be an expert as it’s also about facilitating discussion). We are aiming for a range of topics to appeal across the profession but appreciate we can’t be too choosy!
- Set the date with the physiotalk team – normally we will set dates up to 4 months in advance but are happy to book things in further ahead if needed (see our calendar here).
- Draft some pre-chat information – this should include a short overview of the areas to be discussed, useful links for pre-chat reading, and questions for the chat. This should be no longer than 400-500 words.
- Fill in this Guest host form and send to us via email and then we will post it on the physiotalk blog.
- Make sure you promote the tweetchat through social media and other networks. We will also tweet some build up tweets from physiotalk ahead of the chat.
During the chat
- How we run the chat will very much depend on how confident you feel and whether one or more of you are involved, so options include:
- The physiotalk team leading from physiotalk and you co-hosting from your organisation’s account or personal account
- You leading from your organisation’s account or personal account with or without help from us
- Ask some pre-planned and more spontaneous questions and also respond to people’s question and responses and some final tweets to finish.
After
- Will will add the transcript to the pre-chat page.
- You can also use hosting a #physiotalk discussion to demonstrate the impact of your learning about social media.
physiotalk 
This is a really useful post, I am definitely interested in at least co-hosting although I have no idea what topic I would like to cover. I find the thought of all of the post-chat data etc quite daunting as it seems so well done after the first two and I have no experience of it at all.
Thanks Peter- looking forward to working on a chat topic with you!
Sorting out the chat data is very easy so can’t take any credit for it really, and can show you how – you just go here: http://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/physiotalk/ and enter the time period you want to cover at the bottom of the page, choose if you want analytics or a transcript – and it does it for you (just need to remember it’s PST not GMT so 8 hours behind). We just then hyperlink to the pages for the analytics & transcript in the post-chat blog post.