Paul B. Kaiser

Twitter chats have been around for years, but they seem to be increasing with industries like pharmaceutical, education, marketing and new business efforts. For example, see all these chats in the pharma industry. I thought laying down some of the rules and tools for Twitter Chats would be a good start for those just thinking about starting a chat. To begin you should know that twitter chats are great engagement and highly targeted to your audience.

The average engagement stats for popular Twitter chats are:

• Posts – 1450
• Users – 289
• Reach – 1,456,928
• Impressions – 13,993,986

And If you’re wondering if Twitter is still growing, know that;

• There are 330M monthly active users
• A total of 1.3 billion accounts have been created
• Of those, 44% made an account and left before ever sending a Tweet
• Only 550 million people have ever sent a Tweet
• 500 million people visit the site each month without logging in

So what is a Twitter Chat?

Twitter chats are public Twitter conversations that take place surrounding a specific hashtag at a predetermined date and time. The hashtag often provides some context for the topic or theme of the chat, and allows people to easily find the conversation and participate. Most often, Twitter chats are not one-off discussions, but rather recurring events.

A Twitter chat can help you:

• Build authority and establish your brand’s leadership in your area
• Enable members of your business to be identified as influencers
• Make new connections with relevant Twitter users
• Share valuable and informational content with your audience
• Boost your brand awareness through increased mentions and discussions surrounding your brand

Tips to Make a Twitter Chat Worth Your Time

• Participate in a chat before hosting your own.
•  Choose the right topic for your audience.
•  Find the right date and time.
• Choose the right hashtag
  • A hashtag chat is a way of organizing a conversation so that anyone on Twitter can follow, join, and contribute. It centers around a single hashtag, often including the word “chat”, that usually denotes the broad topic of conversation. Hashtag chats are pre-organized and occur at the same time every day, week or month..
  • Do your research to find something unique. 
  • Keep it short and sweet.. 
• Choose the right moderator.
• Invite relevant influencers and community members to participate.
• Create a Chat Brief.
• Promote. Promote. Promote.

Tools to Host or Engage:

Chats can be very active, with a lot of people participating and a lot of new tweets coming in every moment, so there is a great chance you will miss something important and become frustrated after at first. Luckily, there are tools you can use to make this process easier and much more enjoyable.

if You’re Participating in a chat:

TweetChat

It also provides an easy-to-use share button that allows anyone to promote the chat from within the app.

Other major benefits include the ability to pause Tweets or choose the speed that new posts head your way, so you have a chance to read and reply. The minimum interval is five seconds, which for some Twitter users might be a slow in terms of updating Tweets.

Tchat

Tchat.io is a web service that makes it incredibly easy to participate in Twitter chats. You simply enter a hashtag that you want to follow and the tool will instantly load all the tweets with that hashtag. Tchat will update the stream with new tweets in real-time.

You can pause the stream whenever you like, hide retweets, or switch between hashtags if you are following more than one topic.

If You’re going to Host a chat – Hootsuite

Although Hootsuite is a very robust social media management tool, it’s also widely used to keep up with Twitter chats. It streams Tweets from chats to allow hosts to effectively moderate the conversation. Simply add a stream, search for the hashtag you want to track and join the conversation. You can add multiple streams, meaning you can track various Twitter chats along with your Tweets, scheduled posts, mentions, direct messages, and much more.

In addition, Hootsuite offers some great internal collaboration features, allowing you to assign Tweets to different team members and start internal chats regarding any particular tweet. Up to 3 social profiles, you can benefit from Hootsuite’s free version.

 If You’re Watching Multiple Chats on Twitter – Tweetdeck

TweetDeck is one of the most popular free Twitter management tools because of its ability to add extra columns to target and customize streams of Tweets, making it easy to filter and keep up with lots of Twitter conversations.

A good setup in TweetDeck could be one column for @mentions of your Twitter account, two columns for the hashtag (one to watch the stream, and one toe pause/scroll through specific tweets), one user column to see the Tweets you’ve put out and one column to follow the Tweets of the chat moderator to help you keep up with the questions.

Other benefits of TweetDeck include managing multiple Twitter accounts and the ability to synchronize your configuration when you use TweetDeck on different computers and mobile devices.

Finally

Getting involved in Twitter chats is a great way to attract new followers and actively participate in relevant conversations with peers from your niche or industry. You can use any of the above tools to start leveraging the benefits of Twitter chats for your clients or yourself. Just get involved in a few chats and you’ll pick up on what to do.