This week I had the opportunity to to help a friend (@AshleyAW) who was hosing her first tweet chat #PRSSA. She was hosting the chat on behalf of @PRSSANC and the goal was to unite and connect PR students and to increase awareness/excitement for the annual PRSSA National Conference (which will be held in DC in Oct. 2010). Ashley contacted me for a few last-minute tweetchat tips because she thought I might have some good ideas/tips even though I haven’t personally hosted a chat before. I was honored that Ashley thought to ask, yet I felt incredibly inadequate but gave her a few ideas that I thought might help. Ashley did a great job and #PRSSA chat was awesome! Here are some of the tips I mentioned to her. What do you think? What else should I have included?
Tips on hosting a successful tweetchat:
1. Begin with introductions – People like to tell about themselves and it creates a way for everyone to get to know each other beyond their 140 character responses.
2. Keep it to an hour – If people linger and chat, that’s great, but you don’t want people to feel they have to stay around for 2 hrs especially on the first chat when you aren’t sure of the turnout.
3. Set a timed outline – Plan to have questions roll out at a specific interval (e.g. 10min, 15min, etc.) but keep in mind that some questions might be answered in 5 minutes & you don’t want your chat to go silent. You made need to release the next question ahead of schedule to keep things moving.
4. Have more questions than you think you will need – That’s pretty self explanatory.
5. Twitter accounts for the chat & personal – This may vary by chat but for in this case I thought it would be good to moderate the chat from the @PRSSANC account and have her answer her own thoughts and opinions from her personal account. It increases participation and doesn’t attach any opinions to the national account.
6. Transcript – When the chat is over you can use sites like What The Hash Tag to create a transcript of the chat and pass along to those who weren’t able to join or for those who could but wanted to read some of the info they may have missed.
7. List Participants – Making a list helps you keep organized and encourages participants to return.
JackieB3 is here... 