A Twitter Chat is a wonderful way to connect with people who share a similar passion or interest. It provides a place for people to ask questions, share their experiences, help each other and get ideas. Not bad considering you only get 140 characters or less per tweet.
A Twitter Chat is when a group of people use Twitter to discuss a topic. A hashtag is assigned to the chat so everyone can follow the conversation. Everyone adds the hashtag to their tweet so everyone knows which tweets are part of that particular conversation.
On Tuesday I hosted my first Twitter chat for our client, @ScrapbookExpo. The chat was set up for 6pm PST. I tweeted about it daily leading up to the event so our followers on Twitter would know when to go and how to participate. I did my homework and had lots of information to share on a topic previously suggested by one of our twitter followers. At exactly 6pm PST I began the conversation using Twitter Chat to keep track of all the tweets with our hashtag, #scrapbook.
I shared as much information as I could and time flew by. The hour long conversation was up before I knew it. There were a few problems, but I was able to interact with a group of people about a common passion and everyone enjoyed the Tweets they were able to read. All in all it was a success.
The biggest problem we had was that Twitter was lagging. At times, it was difficult to follow the conversation. I would read the newest Tweets only to find they were sent out 10 minutes earlier. A bit frustrating, but I tweeted on. From my Twitter Chat participants I learned that using Tweetdeck solved this problem. For my next Twitter Chat I’m going to use Tweetdeck. The other thing I’m going to do differently is use a different hashtag, one that is not commonly used. I’m hoping that will help to avoid the lag issue. It seems you can’t do much when Twitter is lagging. If I encounter the same problem next week I am going to move the chat to a different time and/or day.
The topic of our chat was How to Host Your Own Crop, a crop is basically a Scrapbooking party. At the end of the Twitter Chat a couple participants tweeted that the ideas and conversation inspired them to host their own crop.
One of the things I shared was that you can have a crop to get together with old friends or to find new ones; you can find fellow scrapbookers on meetup.com, scrapbook messageboards, or even Twitter. That’s when I found out that two of the Twitter Chat participants found each other on Twitter and became great friends. Two people living in the same area with a common passion. They hang out and scrapbook together and I just think it’s so cool that they were able to meet on Twitter. Isn’t Social Media awesome?
-Lacey Welborn
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I also like Twitter Chats because you can read them later by searching the hashtages, great way to do a bit of research and stay up with favorite subjects.
Great point Michael. We always post the #Scrapchat transcripts to the Weekly Scrapper website – http://www.weeklyscrapper.com/. That way our users can always view the transcripts after the chat has taken place. – Zeb
Michael, thank you for the information on Twitter Chat! I am trying to learn all I can about marketing on Twitter.
Zeb, When I wrote the comment I had just read Michael’s comment! Sorry for the flub! Have great year!
No worries. Have a great year too Jeanne!
Zeb