Hosting a Twitter chat is easy and an awesome way to interact with your fans and followers. In addition to engaging with your audience, it’s a great way to portray your business or organization as a thought leader within your industry.
Here are six tips to hosting your very own Twitter chat:
• First things first, choose a unique hashtag. A hashtag is a way for Twitter users to quickly search and find information about a specific topic. It includes the hash symbol “#” followed by certain keywords or phrases—without spaces.
• Next, schedule your chat at a time that’s most convenient for your target audience. According to Ragan’s PR Daily, the best times of day to tweet are from 9 to 11 a.m. EDT and 1 to 3 p.m. EDT. Also, your tweets are more likely to get attention from your followers toward the end of the week.
• Register your chat on Twebevent, which tracks and monitors upcoming Twitter chats. This is a great way to get your chat noticed by the public, especially if you’re a small business.
• Tweet about it! You should start promoting your chat 3-5 days prior to the event. The idea is to get people excited about the upcoming event. This will also allow them ample time to prepare for the chat.
• Create engaging discussion questions. Select a topic and develop questions that you think your target audience would actually want to discuss. This may require a little research on your part.
• It’s go time! Prior to the launch, you should inform your audience when the chat is about to begin. On the same note, you should prepare participants before each question is asked. [See example below, courtesy of Muck Rack]
Hosting a Twitter chat is easy as pie! Keep in mind that during the chat you will want someone to monitor the entire event and take notes. Recording participants’ answers and responding to quality questions and feedback is the best way to keep the chat relevant.
Good luck and have fun with it (Muck Rack did)!
Editors note: PixelRazor.com will be hosting a live Twitter chat on June 6, 2012, at 2 p.m. EDT. Tune in to see a live chat in progress.