Want to streamline your Q&A sessions? Take a cue from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which used Twitter to manage a Q&A session during the keynote address at its Annual Conference & Expo in June. Here’s how you can do it at your show:

Start the Twitter conversation prior to the event. First, create a Twitter hashtag for your show, which will group all of the tweets related to the event. Then, start tweeting to promote the use of Twitter at the show. Also make sure that your show site emphasizes how Twitter will be used.

Afraid some of your attendees aren’t so Twitter-savvy? Try posting a video on the show site to walk them through the process of creating a Twitter account and using it to tweet questions and comments at the event, like SHRM did. “Use of Twitter in HR is booming, but not everyone is as familiar with it, so we wanted to help bring our members up to speed and really engage with it,” says China Gorman, Chief Global Member Engagement Officer at SHRM.

Promote the event early to build buzz. “We started engaging on Twitter three months before the conference to interact with members and others to build buzz about it,” Gorman says. “Then I broke the news on Twitter that Jack Welch, former Chairman of GE, would be our keynote speaker.We knew our members would have a lot of questions for him, and it can be difficult to organize with 10,000 people in the room, so we decided to use Twitter to handle it on-site.” She also informed followers that they’d have an opportunity to ask Welch questions via Twitter.

Appoint a moderator to manage the Q&A session. At the SHRM event, a moderator conducted an interview with Welch onstage and then opened up the conversation for questions from the audience. Backstage, live events agency inVNT set up a computer to display the incoming tweets, so staff could review them and choose the best ones to send to the moderator’s teleprompter onstage. As questions were fed to the moderator, she could announce where they came from and then pose the question to Welch. Have a staff member tweet during the event to keep the momentum going. Gorman tweeted throughout the interview as well during the Q&A session to help keep the Twitter conversation going. “We got a lot of significant feedback that the tweeting was appreciated by those who couldn’t attend,” she says.