Hi Liliana,
As various people have mentioned, it depends on what your audience is, and what the purpose of the networking is as well - for example, when I run the Barcelona Fun Science Meetup events, I usually have an icebreaker activity of a small hands-on experiment, puzzle or challenge which the attendees can do independently, and then ask a question so that they can be trying to work it out and start thinking about the topic for the event before we start.
I also regularly attend networking events in Barcelona, and there's a great activity for pure networking that is run by a friend of mine (founder of Flylancer) at her events (usually 20 - 50 people) - she calls it 'Busy Bees', and basically you split into groups of 3 people. One person is the 'Queen Bee' and they say a type of person, a skill, an activity, or a social element that they are looking for from the event, and their two 'worker bees' then go off and have 5-10 minutes to talk to everyone in the room and try to find (and get contact details for!) people who can help their queen. After the time minutes is up, the facilitator calls it and the worker bees report back, and then you swap over in your groups so that the next person gets to make a request.
It's great because it takes some of the pressure off when you're actually networking for somebody else, and it's light enough that its fun to take part. I've seen every sort of request from 'friends from the US', through 'a CEO to give me life advice', 'graphic designers', 'a climbing partner', 'someone who knows about Wordpress' and more... it can be as formal or informal as people want it to be, and everyone will have an idea of what they were looking for when they came to your event so it's less scary than the fun fact thing.
She also gives people 2 name labels when they come in - 1 for their name, and 1 for them to write the name of a film that describes their professional life right now. It's a great idea to spark conversations, she's still working on the facilitation to make full use of it, but it's an idea to be aware of if you want something less formal.
Hope this helps!
Rachel
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