For #POM21Ja, the Online Poster Session will have two parts: an asynchronous Twitter session and a synchronous Gather.town session.
The Twitter session will occur first, beginning at 9 am EST on Monday January 11, 2021, and will continue throughout the day as presenters tweet their posters. Participants are encouraged to post at the time that is most convenient for them, depending on their timezone. All official virtual posters will be retweeted from @PhotonicsMeetup.
The Gather.town session will occur on Thursday January 13, 2021, from 1:00 – 2:30 pm EST. Twenty selected posters will be invited to directly interact with attendees via video chat on the Gather.town platform. More information can be found on the Gather.town poster session page.

What is an online poster session?
Unlike a conventional poster which consists of a single sheet of paper that is several feet wide and tall, the online poster session will take place on Twitter, where participants will tweet their “posters”. A single tweet will include four images along with a brief summary, as shown in the example.
To maximize interaction during the POM Poster session, we strongly encourage you to set up a personal or laboratory Twitter account, if you do not have one already. This will ensure that you will be able to interact with other posters in the session as well.
If you do not have access to Twitter, please send your poster to posters@photonicsonlinemeetup.org. We will send your poster out as a tweet from the official @PhotonicsMeetup account. You are encouraged to include your contact information (email address, etc.) on the poster slides, to facilitate further interaction with anyone interested in your work.

Preparing your images and tweet for posting
To ensure that your images are the correct aspect ratio, we have prepared a powerpoint template that is posted on the conference website. This series of four slides already has the correct aspect ratios and font sizes to accommodate twitter. These slides were used to create the tweet shown above. There are several aspects that must be considered when designing the images and when posting:
- Aspect ratio and legibility of images on twitter
- Number of images that can be contained in a single tweet
- Hashtags for increasing visibility and associating poster with conference
A typical text for your tweet should contain the right hashtags (with # and your poster topic) and tag (@ your co-authors or affiliation additionally to @PhotonicsMeetup) :
We demonstrated this cool and impressive integration of photonics and biosensing. The implications for applications A and B are substantial. @PhotonicsMeetup #POM21ja #POM21bio <poster in 4 images>
The #POM21ja must always be included or the poster will not be retweeted. The other hashtags should be included if you submitted to one of the three main #POM21ja topics or if you want your poster to be associated with one of these topics: #POM21bio #POM21combs #POM21meta #POM21other.
To help you prepare your poster, we are providing a PowerPoint template and some additional guidance:
- Guidelines for designing images and tweeting (pdf)
- Poster template (ppt file)
- Sample poster images (pdf)
If you are new to Twitter and would like guidance on how to use it for science communication, we recommend the following website: https://t4scientists.com/ (no affiliation with POM).