Twitter town hall helps to promote HIV Testing Day

CDC division shows how to optimize your reach with an interactive event

The traditional town hall meeting has gone high tech, with participants sounding off in 140-character bursts.

To prepare for National HIV Testing Day on June 27, the National Prevention Information Network, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, recently hosted a 90-minute Twitter town hall event. The result was a give-and-take with a potential audience of 80,000-plus followers.

The town hall reached an estimated 80,000+ people. Below are the organizations that participated and their follower totals:

The organization was joined by the National Association of People with AIDS and by AIDS.gov, a division of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.

The purpose was to share NPIN’s best practices with HIV/AIDS prevention partners and talk about how social media could bring awareness to the national day of HIV screening. Organizers designated a special hashtag, #NHTD, so that participants and interested onlookers could search for and track relevant tweets.