We run monthly #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
- 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 but generally the physiotalk team will lead from @physiotalk and you co-host from your organisation’s account or personal account
- Ask some pre-planned and more spontaneous questions and also respond to people’s question and responses and some final tweets to finish.
After
- 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.