What To Do When When Your Thoughts Have A Word Count
140 characters is not enough…
I’ve never hosted a “Twitter chat” a day in my life. Before a few weeks ago, I’d never even heard of one. With Twitter quickly leading the charge as one of the most prominent social media platforms for news, it’s an application that I’ve spent countless hours on. But even with 19,000 tweets and over seven years of Twitter use under my belt, I was not prepared for hosting a conversation on the site.
One of the first things that came to mind was how temperamental social media could be. It’s very easy to go viral for something trivial, whether it’s for something good or bad. Depending on how the internet audience is feeling on a given day, responses to tweets can be positive and helpful or volatile and venomous, and can be difficult to figure out what kind of day you’re in for.
This especially heightened a platform such as Twitter, where all you get is 140 characters to try and formulate a cohesive tweet that says everything you want it to. If nothing else, hosting a Twitter chat forces you to stick to just the important details. With that also comes being mindful of the audience you want to attract. How many emojis should you use? And which ones? Should you tag someone? Is tagging that person going to cut into the amount of characters you have left? What about a picture? Or a gif? All of these elements have an effect on how much traction your tweet will get and how many people are likely to respond to whatever you’re putting out there.
With hosting comes the reality of also RESPONDING to people who are involved in the conversation as well. A good amount of interaction is required in order to have a Twitter chat that users want to continue to be involved in. A lot more brain power is involved in something like this than one might think. Hosting a Twitter chat is a consistent wheel of thinking going on.
With having a successful Twitter chat also comes all the preparation beforehand. You can’t just log onto Twitter and ask questions and hope that people are on and paying attention enough to want to interact with you. Preparation for the chat took an entire week and, quite frankly, a good amount of harassment. In order to make sure that people tune in, you have to repeatedly beat the details into them.
And even the constant tweeting sometimes may not be enough to spark interest. Without interest, you don’t have a successful conversation. I had to use all of my available resources to make sure that at LEAST one person would be loyal and tune in to this chat and insure that this interaction wouldn’t be one sided.
My harassing ended up being fruitful at least for one person. I had one consistent friend tune in to the chat and answer as many questions as he could. Getting other people to answer questions and use the hashtag also means that anyone that they follow has the chance to see the conversation and join in as well.
I would say that my biggest take away from hosting a Twitter chat is that there is SO much more to be mindful of than one would think going into it. Twitter is successful as a social media platform by being versatile and having a lot of different ways for their users to interact.
However, that versatility means that there are a lot of options available to attempt to make your tweets interesting and inviting, and that can quickly become overwhelming. Twitter is a medium that requires a lot of practice to master, and I’m sure that even with seven years of Twitter experience under my belt, I still have a lot to learn about this ever evolving tool.
