So what can we learn from Twitter about presenting? Here are
five Twitter best practices that most regular Tweeters follow. By incorporating
variations of these best practices into your presentation bag of tricks, you can
engage your audience more, be relevant to your listeners and ensure attention
and retention!
Twitter Best
Practices for PPT Presenters
1. Follow the140
character limit. By limiting what we say, we end up being more thoughtful
when we tweet. Apply that same mindset to your PPT presentations. How many
times have you heard speakers who spoke for 15 minutes but had 30 or 40 slides?
No matter how long you are speaking, don’t ramble on and on with a lot of
slides. Try limiting your slides to just
5 (the PPT equivalent to Twitter’s 140 character limit). People are there to
hear YOU speak, not watch you jockey through 50 slides.
2. Mark key ideas
with #. As Twitter users know, the # marks relevant or key topics. When presenting,
it’s a great best practice to call out the important or key ideas in your
presentation. Don’t assume your audience will know what they are. Instead of a hash
tag, use a phrase like “What’s really important is…” or “This can be critical…” or “We have to take notice of…” Any phrase or
word that punctuates a main idea is the verbal equivalent of a Twitter hash tag.
3. Retweet. When
we read a great tweet, we want to pass it on and acknowledge it by retweeting.
Some of the best presentations and speeches also acknowledge the ideas of
others. This can be citing something a prominent person has done, referring to
some critical business action or explaining a best practice. Another way to
retweet or acknowledge is to use a short quote. The introduction or wrap-up is
a great place to quote others; it’s memorable and gets attention. Just make
sure you are accurate and always cite the work of someone you are referencing.
4. Use Bitly to
condense a long url. Very often when
we want to tweet an idea referenced on a long url, we’ll go to bitly and
condense it to a smaller, more manageable link. In a presentation, is there a
way to cut ideas down to make them more manageable for the listener? Think of
all the technical jargon that we might use. Is there a way to shorten it so it
makes sense to the average listener? Why
would you want to say, “A user
can associate their NIC with only one SSID, and does not seem to be receiving
an IP address from the DHCP server?” No one will understand you! Shorten your
technical jargon to a few words the average listener “gets.” BTW, the above technobabble means, “The user
can only connect to one network and even then doesn’t have Web or Storage.”
5.
Reply @. Experienced
Tweeters know that this is how you engage in conversation. It’s how you reply to someone’s tweet. In a
presentation, isn’t that what it’s all about: a conversation? You an insert a
reply@ in your presentation by asking a few questions placed throughout your
talk: “Are there any questions?” or “Has anyone else had a similar experience?”
“Do you need a few more examples?” Anything
you can do to engage the audience is a step in the right direction.
In the end, Twitter can teach us a lot
of communication best practices, not just for Twitter talk, but for our conversations,
public speaking AND presentations.
