Making the most of Twitter chats

Here are 5 tips for making the most of twitter or tweet chats. These virtual meetings take place every day on Twitter and allow you to talk about a particular topic as well as meet new people. It’s also the term given to conversation around a live event, such as rugby match or TV program. Conversation is centred around a hashtag for the event eg #SuperBowl or #AppleCrowd (2pm GMT on Tuesdays).

Twitter chats can benefit businesses in two ways. Firstly, you can join in with virtual meetings to improve your knowledge and demonstrate your expertise. Secondly, you can set up your own twitter chat to raise awareness of you, your business and products which will help you grow your audience and acquire new clients.

1) Set up your own Twitter chat. Picking on a relevant topic and setting up a tweet chat is a great opportunity for UK businesses as most tweet chats are based in the US.

2) Use tweetchat.com. Enter the tweet chat hashtag and this app will help you focus on the tweet chat of your choice. It will also automatically adds the hashtag you’re using within your tweets.

3) Grow your audience. They’ll be more people watching the tweet chat than taking part, so play to your audience by sharing your thoughts, ideas and knowledge and demonstrating your expertise. In particular, tweet chats around live events can have a huge audience and there’s potential for you to receive a lot of retweets. See How to do Twitter marketing in real time for examples from the SuperBowl.

4) Keep tweets to around a 110-120 characters. If you’re looking for retweets (and you should be) keep your tweets concise and pithy, so there’s space for others to ‘manually retweet’ you.

5) Follow people who interact with you. To get to know new people, return interest shown in you by following. For example, if anyone tweets you (sends you an @ message), follows, favourites or retweets you, then follow them.

Whatever your level of Twitter knowledge I provide training to suit. I offer one-to-one Twitter training plus Twitter for Business and Advanced Twitter for Business workshops.

Do you take part on tweet chats? If so, please post your experience in the Comments below.