Are you curious about how to host a Twitter chat? Wonder no longer. This is what you need to know.
- Decide upon your goals to measure success.
- Find a hashtag you like.
- Sign up for a Twitter account with your new hashtag as the user name/handle.
- Sign up for a Wthashtag.com account to “claim” your handle.
- Write up guidelines and place them on your blog so you can tweet a link to them during the chat.
- Write guidelines for potential guests to let them know how the chat works.
- Email your guidelines to each chat guest before the chat begins.
- Prepare your questions in advance.
- Mix up your programming. Have open Q&A. Interview people. What else could you do? What would an “in-person” event look like on Twitter?
- Use Hootsuite, Tweet Deck, or Tweet Grid to manage your chat.
- With the above software, create columns for your chat hashtag, your @handlename, the handles of your featured guests, and your direct messages. This will help you moderate the chat.
- Use your claimed Twitter account to tweet from during the chat. Some people like this and some don’t (I don’t use this idea). The good side is you don’t clutter up your feed. The down side is people will probably follow your chat Twitter feed instead of your main Twitter feed.
- Use your claimed Twitter feed to post questions. If you have a Twitter savvy audience, they will probably know to follow this Twitter feed to see the questions. If not, you can outline that in the chat guidelines you post to your blog.
- Use Wthashtag.com to make a transcript.
- Consider creating a PDF of your chat and posting it to your blog.
- Review your goals. Are you achieving what you want from the chat?
- Ask yourself if you need a co-host to share the work.
- Summarize the chat in a blog post and post to your blog.
- After the chat, tweet out the transcript from Wthashtag.com. People will usually be grateful for this.
- Publicize your chat. (Invite people via your Facebook page and send reminders via Twitter.)
- Before the chat starts, warn your Twitter followers you’ll be in a chat and your feed will be full of chat-related Tweets.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great post. I’ve considered doing a Tweet chat before, but my biggest concern would be making sure the topic was relevant and that I could track the appropriate audience.