How to Conduct a Tweet Chat for Your Business or Brand
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- Internet Connectivity: Make sure your internet connection is up and running before the scheduled chat, and have a backup connection; for example, a wireless option if your cable connection goes down or acts funky.
- Prepared Q&A: If your tweetchat includes moderated Q&A where you know the moderator’s questions ahead of time, write your answers so they are ready to post by copy & paste, and make sure they are all 140 characters or less, including the special hashtag.
- Connect Your Team Offline by Phone: Everyone involved in managing the Tweet Chat should be connected via phone. This enables you to discuss answers before posting them, coordinate the question and answer session more smoothly, and deal with any glitches that occur during the chat session.
- Browser Compatibility: Test your browser before hand. Twitter is situationally fickle and may work better with some browsers than others.
- Manage Your Answers: If you’ve pecked out your answers beforehand and are copying and pasting from a Word or Google Doc, be sure to mark answers that have already been answered. Strikethrough and highlighting work equally well.
- For Multi-Taskers Only: Bring your multi-tasking A-game. You’ll need it.
- Use a Twitter Management Application: Use a Twitter management application like Seesmic or Hootsuite, which automatically updates the flow of tweets on screen, shortens tweets if they get too long, and truncates any links you may want to add to your tweets. Also, consider using a service, such as tweetchat.com that automates many of the functions for you.
- Relax: Be prepared to live with the fact that Twitter regularly experiences outages.
- Internet Connectivity: Make sure your internet connection is up and running before the scheduled chat, and have a backup connection; for example, a wireless option if your cable connection goes down or acts funky.
- Prepared Q&A: If your tweetchat includes moderated Q&A where you know the moderator’s questions ahead of time, write your answers so they are ready to post by copy & paste, and make sure they are all 140 characters or less, including the special hashtag.
- Connect Your Team Offline by Phone: Everyone involved in managing the Tweet Chat should be connected via phone. This enables you to discuss answers before posting them, coordinate the question and answer session more smoothly, and deal with any glitches that occur during the chat session.
- Browser Compatibility: Test your browser before hand. Twitter is situationally fickle and may work better with some browsers than others.
- Manage Your Answers: If you’ve pecked out your answers beforehand and are copying and pasting from a Word or Google Doc, be sure to mark answers that have already been answered. Strikethrough and highlighting work equally well.
- For Multi-Taskers Only: Bring your multi-tasking A-game. You’ll need it.
- Use a Twitter Management Application: Use a Twitter management application like Seesmic or Hootsuite, which automatically updates the flow of tweets on screen, shortens tweets if they get too long, and truncates any links you may want to add to your tweets. Also, consider using a service, such as tweetchat.com that automates many of the functions for you.
- Relax: Be prepared to live with the fact that Twitter regularly experiences outages.
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