What Is a Twitter Chat?
Twitter chats are online events designed to help people interested in a specific topic meet others who are also interested in that topic. Everyone gets together at a set time to network virtually. When you attend a chat, you actually read and respond to other participants' tweets—as opposed to sending tweets about your news, regardless of whether anyone is actively listening.
How It Works
Our #womenwritersnet chat will take place over a fun, fast hour. We’ll send out a question for everyone to answer/discuss about every ten minutes. Each question is labeled Q1, Q2 and we ask that each answer be labeled A1, A2. To make sure your comments can be seen by everyone at the chat, please include #womenwritersnet in your tweets.
How To Make Friends on a Twitter Chat
During the chat, we encourage you to send out your own tweets. However, don’t forget to pay attention to what others are tweeting. When someone tweets about a book or author you love, you can reply to that person. If a conversation develops, feel free to keep talking even if you miss a little of the rest of the chat. Responding to other people’s tweets is a great way to make new connections and friends online. After the chat, we suggest that you follow everyone you talked to as well as everyone whose tweets you enjoyed.
How To Follow a Twitter Chat
Twitter chats usually have a unique hashtag. If you don’t currently use a social media management program, you can use the search function at the top right of Twitter to find the conversation. Ours, of course, will be locatable with the hashtag #womenwritersnet. Make sure all your tweets use that hashtag or they will get lost in the Twittersphere.
However, to really get the most out of a busy chat, we recommend using a social media management program like Tweetdeck. These programs allow you to filter tweets with searches on hashtags or specific accounts. This is what one of our network member’s Tweetdeck layout looks like when she’s attending a chat. There are streams for all the tweets going to the chat hashtag, mentions of Rita’s account (@RitaKitty8) and her tweets. This way, she can watch the conversation as a whole and keep track of any of her side conversations that develop.
More Help
If you’re unfamiliar with Tweetdeck or if you’re looking for pointers on using it more effectively, Twitter provides two excellent step-by-step guides covering both the basic (here) and advanced features (here). YouTube is also a great source for user generated how-to videos about using Tweetdeck, such as here or here.