Your first Tweet chat: What you need to know to be successful
I’ve participated in a number of Tweet chats and they are a great way to gain followers, establish your authority and both interact with and learn from others.
Tweet chats are quite popular and if you plan on being a Twitter power user and leveraging it to become a recognized influencer, you need to jump in and get involved. If you don’t find yourself being invited to participate in the Tweet chats of other users – yet – start your own.
If you’ve been wondering how to start a Tweet chat, here’s what you need to know to get going:
- Create a unique, short-as-possible, easy-to-type hashtag.
- Make sure your hashtag has not been used.
- It’s best if you establish a regular Tweet chat schedule so people catch on.
- Check for scheduling conflicts. Here are resources:
- Tweetreports has a twitter chat schedule (can also schedule your chat).
- Twubs has a list (can also schedule your chat).
- Calendar where you can view by topic/category.
- Chatsalad lists chats that are about to start or are in the near future.
- Schedule guests/cohosts who have significant Twitter followers. That allows you to leverage their promotional powers.
- Create a static web page that has all the details on your chat and how a Twitter chat works.
- Create promotional graphics, videos for your Tweet chat.
- Include date, time, hashtag to use and a subject for the chat. If it is a reoccurring chat, make sure to let people know that and then regularly update the information to reflect what will be discussed each week.
- Summarize your Twitter chats on your blogs. (They can give you a lot of ideas and direction for your blog posts and other social media.)
- Get participants’ feedback, input on the Tweet chat and future topics for chats.
- Analyze your sessions to find the most influential participants. Here’s a Twitter archiving Google sheet. It would be great to know if someone who participated in your chat had 100k followers, for example.
Various Twitter clients can be used to participate in a Tweet chat. Streams or columns can be added to Hootsuite and Tweetdeck to follow the hashtag. Tweetchat.com makes it very easy to follow and participate in a Tweet chat session.
To keep Tweet chats moving, you need to give your guests a list of questions that you will discuss. Without some advance notice, it can be very hard to compose responses within the 140-character length that Twitter requires.
Do you have any recommendations to help people stage or participate successfully in a Tweet chat? Share them below!