My First Twitter Chat Experience #SEOchat
Every week on Thursdays from 1 p.m EST to 2 p.m EST a Twitter chat is hosted by Emily Christopher a content marketer. This being my first Twitter chat I had no idea what to expect other than knowing that the topic I chose to participate in was interesting to me. I found out quickly that a Twitter chat is a great place to learn about a subject in an informal way. The chat started with Emily breaking the ice by asking what people were going to dress up as for Halloween and once people began to talk the chat moved quickly on to this week’s topic.This week’s Twitter chat focused in on gated content. The chat specifically focused on three questions:
- What is gated content?
- How to optimize your gated content?
- and Is the content you have worthy of being gated?
Prior to the Twitter chat the closest I had heard to gated content was in reference to the news media and gatekeepers that kept certain stories from being published. However, while I did not know about gated content because of the informal nature of the chat I was able to ask if what I was thinking was similar and simultaneously read what the others participating in the chat knew about gated content. Thanks to all of the people answering the question of what gated content was I was able to quickly catch on that gated content was simply content that required a user to input information in order to get it. For example, a video or story requiring a person to input their email address is an example of gated content.
The next major point of focus of the Twitter chat was how to optimize your gated content. The consensus that was reached by everyone participating in the chat was that having visuals and a good landing page for your gated content was the best way to optimize your content. For instance, in regards to landing pages many agreed that making sure to not overload the user and having clean visuals for the user to focus on was the best way to optimize gated content.
Finally, the last focus of the Twitter chat was to ask if the gated content you had was actually worth gating. While opinions on how to determine whether or not to gate your content varied there were some repeated ideas that I generally agreed with. The first way I believe you can tell if your content should be gated is to ask yourself is this content something I would want to give my information for. While we can’t speak for all of our visitors if you wouldn’t give up information to see a piece of content it is safe to say other won’t as well. The reasoning I saw that I agreed with on knowing what content can be gated is to see if what your content is providing can be found elsewhere. If I can find another site that gives me the same information for none of my information nine times out of ten I will go for the site that does not ask for my information simply because it is less intrusive.
Overall, my first Twitter chat was highly informative and I will be looking into participating in more in the future. Twitter chats seem to be a great way to learn from various individuals in a quick and easy way.
