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Raphael Wermuth
Writing — on and offline!

Ever done a Twitter chat? Here some tips & tricks from my last week´s baptism…

We are just shortly before a big conference my company is organizing: The #CHOCOVISION conference — a biennial get-together of the cocoa & chocolate industry (s.a. my post 2y ago).

To generate some buzz and make our most important — live — conference communications channel, our Twitter handle @chocovision_org, more trending, we decided to organize our first Twitter chat — that is: basically bringing a panel discussion with a group of experts, as well as a Q&A session, from the real to the online world, while all what is said put into the timeline of Twitter.

There is plenty of information on the web of how to organize a Twitter chat — here some (pre-)reading tips:

Find and register an appropriate Twitter chat hashtag — and plan in a promotion phase

For our purposes we chose #AskChocovision as we wanted to motivate millennials to become part of our conference by asking questions to our chosen group of conference panelists. Once you have your topic, your hashtag, your Twitter chat timing, etc., register your hashtag on Twubs, also add your Twitter chat to other lists (like Tweet Reports) and promote it on your channels. Two examples of visuals how we did it (all easily put together via canva.com):

Use — Twitter — multipliers for being part of your Twitter chat

A Twitter chat can usually help you grow — or even boost — your followership in a very short period of time. This works even better if you chose your panelists very carefully: a) they should be able to contribute to your — wisely chosen — Twitter chat topic; b) they ideally are very active on Twitter already (judged by number of tweets, followership), acting for you/for your Twitter handle as a multiplier to broaden your reach.

In our case, we were able to increase our followership on @chocovision_org by more than 10% with our Twitter chat — also through the help of our panelists Twitter accounts.

Don´t underestimate the preparation work!

Be aware that you, as the organizer, the moderator during the Twitter chat, you need to make sure that everything will run smoothly on Day X. Having said this:

  • you need to coordinate in between all your panelists
  • you need to drive the preparation of a set of prepared questions — for when the discussion you aim to trigger during the 1h Twitter chat does not happen
  • you need to have your panelists prepare the answers to these questions — of course in a Twitter-friendly form (the recently announced changes of Twitter will certainly make life easier here as well)
  • you need to keep up your promotion campaign — and motivate your panelists to cross-promote

This all takes some time, culminating on Day X where you need to…

Organize yourself wisely for during the Twitter chat — and get enough support!

There will be a lot of things you need to take care, follow and coordinate during the 1 hour Twitter chat. Therefore:

  • organize a big-enough room where you and your organizing/moderating team will not be disturbed
  • work with wall projections: we followed our hashtag #AskChocovision and the Twitter handle @chocovision_org beaming the Tweetdeck account on a white wall — of course every member of the moderation team sat behind his own computer and iPad to follow on other things, and of course to post/send out tweets
  • have your panelists connected to you via a conference call — ideally also with an additional group chat. Remember: you need to coordinate during the Twitter chat who is answering what and when.
  • clearly define the roles in your organizing/moderating team
  • we realized during our Twitter chat that moderating with the panelist group as well as trying to actively tweet during the chat is a hard job — better have sb. fully taking care of managing the panelist group
  • we were glad we had sb. collecting all the questions that popped up and putting them into a Google doc everybody had access to — you can easily add there who should answer which question, immediately visible by all involved
  • we came to the conclusion that — for our purposes — we would have needed double the staff in the Twitter chat moderation team than we actually had, in the ideal world…
  • in case — like in ours — you decide that you go for a 80% moderated (that is, working with prepared questions) Twitter chat you would need approx. 20 questions which you can let answer by two to three of your panelists during the Twitter chat hour. You can keep the pace of sending out these pre-prepared items rather high — we realized 15 minutes before the end of the Twitter chat that we still have plenty of stuff in our pipeline, which also would have been interesting for our audience

Do proper analytics & documentation — also for your panelists

The good thing with this Internet is that you can measure and analyse pretty much everything! Capitalize on this! So take enough time shortly after your Twitter chat to prepare an analysis of your event, incl.

  • how many posts with your hashtag were posted during the Twitter chat?
  • how many Re-Tweets were you and your panelists able to generate?
  • how many unique users/participators did you have — that is, how big was your audience?
  • how about the impressions/reach of your tweets?
  • which were the most prominent post/tweets?
  • who were the most influential participators in your Twitter chat?
  • …

There are also tools where you can summarize your Twitter chat for your panelists — because also for them it is hard to follow everything during the Twitter chat. We think Storify is a very easy-to-use and comprehensive tool to do this. Tip: Don´t forget to also include your panelists Twitter handle when pulling together your report — they might have had several discussions with Twitter chat participators where they forgot to add the chat´s hashtag.

You can also use Storify to give your audience a summary of chosen Tweets of the Twitter chat — like we did here:

Enjoy and learn!

I have to say that it was a very interesting experience organizing our first Twitter chat for the #CHOCOVISION conference. We learned a lot. It was ´pure adrenaline´ during the Twitter chat. Of course, we will make things differently next time — taking into consideration what´s been said above. But we would definitely do it again.

PS: Many thanks again to my colleagues @norbadron & @ashywashybambam in supporting me for our first#AskChocovision Twitter chat!

PPS: Make sure to follow #Chocovision next week under @chocovision_org or also our conference blog.