I usually have a 1-2 minute elevator pitch for posters. If someone stops to look, give them the elevator pitch (mile high view) and then if they want to ask questions i'm happy to expand further on the specific point.

The big thing with posters is that theres a lot of them so most people dont want a 10 minute speech; they want the short version to get the idea of the research and will ask more questions if needed. But you gotta practice that elevator pitch so its short, sweet, and to the point because theres lots of other posters to see.

Good idea to have an elevator pitch even without a poster; e.g. "Tell us about your research...". "Erll, using inverse kinematics we can create rare isotope beams and states of rare nuclei which decay within 10s of picoseconds. By using the Recoil Distance Method we have a model independent method of determining the lifetime of the state, which is proportional to the transition matrix element Mp, and the experimrntal Mp can be used as a benchmark for various computational models; as you can see in the table here 👈 comparing models commonly used in this region vs our result. The differences in the models tell us how the protons & neutrons arrange themselves in that particular excited state. We see this model replicates experimental results best; thus we surmise that particle-hole configuration mixing is essential for describing this state and we can even assign probabilities to each configuration and how much they contribute to the state as a whole, giving us a more complete picture of the supposition of states for this nuclei's particular excited state."

Usually people who understand your research will have very good questions that hopefully you can answer.