For part 1 of this series, check out How to participate in a Twitter Chat.
So, you’ve found a cool chat to partake in, and you’re ready to start talking…except that the moment you load up Tweetchat, the tweets roll by faster than a hummingbird, and you’ve been lost in the conversation. Relax, it’s happened to everyone. We’ll be taking a closer look at how to survive your first Twitter chat.
What you need to do is figure out how exactly to talk. In smaller Twitter chats, this may not be a problem as the speed of the chat might be slow enough to look at what everyone says. However, for bigger chats like say, #blogchat, you’re going to need to do some tactics:
Feature the Chat leader and guest (if applicable) – The first thing I do is determine who the chat’s moderator is. If you don’t know, ask. Once you know, you can use Tweetchat’s “Feature” option to highlight that user’s tweets. This means that their tweets will stand out over others, allowing you to keep track of when the conversation turns. Also do this for any special guests in the chat.
You can enable this by clicking on the icon on a person on the person’s Tweet, then click “Feature.” Once you do this, you should also follow the chat leader on Twitter to keep up on future news regarding the chat.
Reply, Reply, Reply – There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to keep track of every conversation happening in a given chat. However, you can still reply to people in a chat publicly while still having the hashtag. Tweetchat lets you reply to multiple people at once, so you can all stay in the same conversation. Who knows? Maybe the convo can continue after the chat is done.
Keep your Twitter @Mentions page up – The more active you are, the more likely people will reply to you, and the faster the chat, the more likely you are to miss when someone sends an @ to you. The best solution to this is to keep your Twitter’s @mentions page right next to Tweetchat’s tab, so you can alternate between the two as needed. If the chat is particularily intense, you may want to wait to reply until after the chat.
WARNING: If you use Twitter proper to reply to people, DON’T forget to add the hashtag!
Be aware of questions asked - Many chats ask questions to their followers, using the format of “Q1: What is a man?” To respond to these, you typically reply to the chat lead (or whoever asks the questions) with “A1: A miserable little pile of secrets!” As the chat progresses, you’ll notice Q2, Q3, etc arising. You should respond to those with “A” followed by the corresponding number, then your response.
These should keep you floating in the turbulent Twitter chat sea. For Part 3, we’ll be looking at Twitter Chat Etiquette.
