What Every Business Owner Ought to Know About Tweet Chats
Imagine walking into a well-moderated conference and coming away with new contacts and action items. Now, imagine that conference takes place every week, it only lasts an hour and you can participate from home while snug in your bunny slippers.
That’s the power of a tweet chat, a time when Twitter can put aside its “cocktail party” image and sustain a focused conversation.
In this article, I’m going to assume you have some experience using Twitter and understand what a hashtag is. If you need to a get a handle on the basics of Twitter, you can read this post.
How it Works
Tweet chats are a scheduled event, usually weekly, around a particular topic. For example, there’s Marketer Monday’s chat at 8:00 p.m. hosted by The Social CMO. They host a different expert each Monday night to discuss a marketing topic.
There are dozens of tweet chats covering topics from marketing, social media, health and even gardening.
You can participate by finding out when your topic of interest is scheduled and setting up a dedicated stream in a tool like Hootsuite to follow it. The tweets will be flying fast and furious. Don’t feel compelled to contribute at first. Just watch and if you feel comfortable contributing to the conversation, go ahead, just remember to include the #whateverhashtag so others in the tweetchat will see it.
Follow the contributors you find interesting and schedule yourself for the tweet chat again the next week.
Over time, you’ll get to know the main participants and you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of current issues in your industry in bite size pieces.
I can’t think of an easier way to get the pulse of a community and meet movers and shakers.
Have you participated in Tweet Chats? Why not share what you’ve learned in the comments below.
