Twitter Chat: #BCTalks or Not …

Twitter seems like it would be an one of the easiest platforms for you to interact with people; you tweet something out, and someone simply replies back to you. So when I heard my Mobile and Social Media course was hosting a Twitter chat, I got super excited. I was ready to respond to tweets and to simply start a conversation. But I quickly learned that hosting a Twitter chat was not so easy.

The chat was hosted for Brooklyn College students, staff and alumni. As one of the hosts, I had the responsibility to promote the chat in order for people to know about it beforehand. I started to promote it on Twitter itself, but that did not seem like the best option for me because I do not have any followers that are associated with Brooklyn College in any form.

So I then decided to just text my friends from Brooklyn College to get the word out, but I hit another dead end because most of the people I contacted did not have Twitter. 🤦🏽‍♀ Now, I really felt like I had failed. Promoting is only the first step, but it might have be the most important step in conducting a Twitter chat.

With this Twitter chat, I realized that to successfully get people to interact with you, you need to actaully have the people. If you are trying to host a chat, you need to have people who are going to participate and interact with you. We ended up having two students and one professor tweeting us their thoughts on Brooklyn College. We were five hosts and were only able to atract the attention of three people. We came to a point where we started to answer our own tweets. 😂 It was a bit discouraging that we did not get more people to chat with us, but that comes to show that an having an audience on a social media platform like Twitter is important.

Although we did not get too many people to join our chat, I found that having intersting topics helps a lot. Since we were talking to Brooklyn College members about the school itself, we were able to connect with them very easily. Making sure that you have a topic that is interesting to your audience is important to keep a Twitter chat going.

The chat went okay for it being the first time that we hosted one but the one thing that I will put time and effort in for future chats is the promoting segment.