How to hold a Twitter Chat with a #Hashtag

How to Use Hashtags to Market Your Business on Social Media

Twitter is a real-time marketing tool. Understanding this is key to learning how to use it effectively to promote your business. You have to realize that it’s not about self-promotion, but offering information that is of interest to your target market.

Twitter is great for:

  • Driving traffic to your website
  • Getting brand exposure
  • Establishing you or your company as experts in your field
  • SEO – tweets come up in Google search results & it’s a backlink

Hashtags are used to classify tweets. It’s the # sign in front of a keyword or phrase. It makes it clickable and searchable. If you use them consistently in your tweets, if someone clicks on one, all the tweets with that hashtag will come up. They are not case sensitive, but capitalize the first letter of each word in a phrase.

How do you use them to hold conversations – a.k.a. a Twitter Chat?

First, you publicize the chat as you would any event and create a hashtag.

I love Twitter!

Someone needs to be the moderator or host of the chat.

At the given time, you start the chat with a short intro then the first question, Q1: ……?

Participants then reply with A1: …… and so forth.

Remember you only have 280 characters. Have your questions prepared in advance.

Use a tool like TweetDeck to manage it. (More on TweetDeck.)

Here’s a Sample Twitter Chat >>>>

Some time ago, I was preparing to give a class on Twitter and I noticed that #AlmondChat was trending. For something to be trending nationally on Twitter, there has to be thousands of people tweeting that name, word, phrase or hashtag. I clicked on it and this is what came up.

#almondchat

This was a chat started by California Almonds (@almonds). It seems to have a guest moderator, “Roadie Nutritionist” as she asked Q10. (2nd one down).

Notice the bottom tweet is A9. We don’t know what Q9 was, but we can assume it was about healthy snacking on vacation. 

Here are some Twitter Chat tips:

  • Try to keep control of the chat – it’s your chat and you can choose to respond or not to respond to people.
  • There are “trolls” out there who’s sole purpose in life is to cause trouble. Ignore or block them.
  • Keep the hashtag short and easy to read so people can quickly tell what it’s about.

Have you ever held a Twitter chat? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Please comment below… also, if you have any questions.

Would you like me to evaluate your social media efforts? We’d love to! Please click to schedule a free 15-minute Zoom consultation and analysis.


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