Twitter Town Hall Sample Agenda

This is an example of an agenda you can use at your agency to organize a Twitter town hall. A Twitter town hall, or Twitter chat, is a when you schedule a scheduled amount of time to take questions from your customers and answer them on the online social networking service using a pre-determined hashtag. 

Agency Participants

(Program Director, Host)

(Program Manager, Co–host)

(Social Media expert)

(Public Affairs Office)

(Representative from the Office of General Counsel)

Time and Location*

Staff Room

Twitter #hashtag

Time: 2:30 PM–3:30 PM

Schedule

2:30 PM—Distribute "Terms of Participation" tweets, possibly including:

• “We’ll be talking all things (insert topic) at 3 PM Eastern today: find out more about our efforts (event hashtag) (link to blog post)”
• “We’ll try to answer as many questions as we can today, but if we miss you, please follow-up (link to blog) (event hashtag)”

Address the fine print Terms of Service in an affable way:

• "We're excited to discuss (topic), but off–mission comments will need to be addressed another time! (event hashtag)"

Periodic tweets to announce time remaining until the town hall would also be helpful.

3:00 PM—Welcome and Introduction of Participants

• Tweet photo of participants and support staff while typing to illustrate that real people are engaging in tweeting, not just one staffer
• Explanation of the agenda
• Discussion of (topic areas) by major category
  • Topic 1 (5 mins)
  • Topic 2 (5 mins)
  • Topic 3 (5 mins)
  • Questions and Answers (10 minutes)
    • Add additional "encore" 5+ mins
  • Reiteration of continuing opportunities to engage after the town hall
  • Invite the public to identify themselves, using the hashtag, to spread conversation to the maximum number of follower communities.

3:05 PM—Topic 1 Dialogue

3:10 PM—Topic 2 Dialogue

3:15 PM—Topic 3 Dialogue

3:20 PM—Questions and Answers

• Invite dialogue of follow–up questions or new ideas and respond with links directing the audience to your blog posts. 
• If the Q&A is successful, keep it going another 5 minutes, but encourage the continuation of the discussion through the blog, etc.​

*Note: Prior to the actual event, your agency should promote the live Twitter chat as they would other agency events. Let people know up to a week ahead of time that it will happen, write blog posts, get supporters to share, and announce internally and to your customers by other means.

Content Lead: Justin Herman
Page Reviewed/Updated: September 27, 2012