How to Host a Twitter Chat - The Ultimate Guide + Free Checklist

How to Host a Twitter Chat – The Ultimate Guide + Free Checklist

How to Host a Twitter Chat - The Ultimate Guide + Free Checklist

This post is a guest contribution from Rebecca Viner.

You want to start building community around your blog/personal brand. You’ve been participating in chats and communities, and you’ve been thinking about forming your own. You don’t want something that takes too much time out of your day, but you do want something that really gets people talking. You’re weighing up the pros and cons of a Twitter chat vs a Facebook/Slack community, but you’re still undecided.


Why host a Twitter chat?

A Twitter chat is a one-per-week/one-per-month event.

After putting in the work to set up your first Twitter chat, further chats will become second nature to you. You won’t have to take lots of time out of your usual schedule for planning. You’ll already have defined your audience, have set a time, have chosen a hashtag, have images ready as templates and have a promotion strategy. Having your own community has no guaranteed structure to it – you may or may not have notifications to reply to, you could find yourself on there for hours on end or with nothing to do after 5 minutes. Hosting a Twitter chat is a guaranteed opportunity to engage with people on a set date, at a set time for a set duration – even if only a few turn up.

It can easily compliment your product or monthly content theme.

If you’re not sure what to have as your Twitter chat topic, you can always turn to your blog/podcast/video content or a product/service that you’re launching. If you’re creating something truly epic for your audience, then why not build more hype around it and demonstrate more of your expertise? Get them really involved and invested in your theme.

It’s effective at getting people involved – a great networking opportunity and helps you to find out more about what your audience wants/needs.

The fast-paced interaction of Twitter chats is appealing to many people who also want to build community and network but have a busy lifestyle. With a community, you might find it more difficult to get people to initially join and then participate. The one-per-week/one-per-month structure gives your audience something in their schedule to look forward to and gives them a reason to turn up. A community can be buzzing one day and the next have nothing going on for your audience, so booking out time in their schedule to interact through a chat is preferable. It also gives you the opportunity to ask the questions you want/need the answers to about your audience. Surveys can be really uninteresting for your audience to work through – through a chat they’re getting live feedback from you to their responses.

What I’ve gotten out of hosting Twitter chats…

  • More Twitter followers = my tweets are added to more feeds = more opportunities to get my content, products, and services seen, shared, and purchased.
  • More client enquiries came from asking about the problems my audience were experiencing, sharing my guidance for their situation and inviting them for a free #StartToSuccess session. After the chat I was then able to follow up with these prospective clients and book them in.
  • More blog traffic came from being able to provide content to support my answers and what my audience needed from me in the form of sending over a link to a relevant post. If I didn’t have any posts myself about the topic, I recommended someone else’s which then shows I have knowledge of my niche/industry and increases trust with my audience.
  • Enjoyment. It was really fun to connect with familiar faces as well as new people, and get to know them.

So you’re sold on hosting a Twitter chat over starting a Facebook/Slack community, but you now don’t know where to start? No worries, I’ve put together a step by step guide plus free checklist.

How to Host a Twitter Chat - The Ultimate Guide + Free Checklist


How to Host a Twitter Chat – Step by Step Guide

1. Define your ideal audience.

Something that as a blogger, you should already be aware of is who your target audience is. Knowing this enables you to deliver content that meets their needs and wants, and to really evoke an emotion that will lead to them commenting, sharing and/or purchasing from you. I’ve got a whole post on that here, but in particular when you’re planning your Twitter chat you need to consider: their age and location (step 2 will make it clear why these are important), and how/when/why they use Twitter. Get really clear on your audience’s habits so you can determine how they find out about Twitter chats, when in the day they use it and what is likely to make them want to join.

2. Decide on a date and time.

Deciding on a date is easy – pick a day not in the too distant future (but gives you enough time to promote) and that doesn’t have a whole bunch of other Twitter chats going on. When it comes to picking a time, this is when the age and location part of step 1 comes in. You need to consider whether your target audience will be at work/school/commuting/asleep. Most Twitter chats are held in the evening when people are winding down (not busy cooking or getting the kids stuff ready for the next day). From my personal experience, I have found 8-9pm to be the optimum time for hosting a chat.

3. Pick your topic.

If you’ve got a product launching or a monthly content theme, you might already know what topic you want to go with, but consider something that’s really going to get people talking (especially for your first chat). Hint: People love to talk about themselves so give them the opportunity to do so, then wait until you’re asked before you give your answer – this shows that you’re a great listener!

4. Research your hashtag.

Nowadays people hashtag everything. There’s not much that hasn’t been ‘hashtagged’ but your aim is to find something that’s not being over-used, is fairly short (so there’s still plenty of characters left in the tweet), but something that accurately describes your chat. If you’re considering hosting multiple chats then picking one hashtag that applies to your personal brand rather than the specific topic will add consistency. It’s important not to mislead people though, e.g. I could call my chat #RVchat (my initials – reflective of my brand) but it could be mistaken for a chat about recreational vehicles rather than about blogging/branding and marketing.

5. Plan & schedule your questions and answers with images.

The most important part of hosting your own Twitter chat is to ask questions that really spark responses. You don’t have to be controversial, but you could for example make a statement that has caused a divide and ask for opinions. If you want to keep the peace a little more, then opt for more open questions. When hosting a chat, it’s good to ask people to introduce themselves at the very beginning and also share a little about you before delving into the questions. Each question and answer should start with Q1, Q2, Q3 and A1, A2, A3 etc to help people who might be jumping in late and know which question they’re responding to. From hosting my own Twitter chats, I’ve found that posting questions and answers at 10 minute intervals (so Introduction at the starting time + 5x Qs + 5x As + Thank you’s at the end time) is a good way to space them out. It’s a real timesaver if you create an image template that can be used for each question (and for future chats), then schedule both your questions and answers before the chat begins using a tool like Buffer (my favourite), Hootsuite, Tweetdeck (the best for keeping up with Twitter chats) or SmarterQueue.

6. Set goals.

I’m a huge advocate for purposeful and practical goal setting. It’s worthwhile setting a measurable figure i.e. how many participants you hope to join in order to see how successful your chat was and/or identify barriers that might have prevented more people joining afterwards. It’s also valuable to consider what you want to get out of hosting a Twitter chat so you can keep that in your mind as you interact with people. Do you want to get more traffic to your site? Then what questions can you ask that will spark an answer that you have a piece of content about?

7. Plan the promotion.

Of course, for people to turn up to your chat you need to get the word out there. Brainstorm all of the potential opportunities for informing people about your chat. Remember, if you add it to a piece of evergreen content, then it’s important to remove the information about it after the chat so you’re not leaving out of date events up (so avoid mentioning it on the blog post image/in the URL/in the title). Think about when you’re going to start promoting your chat, how often you’ll mention it and how you can remind people without spamming.

8. Make notes during the chat.

Open up an app or grab a notepad so you can make a note of anybody to follow up with, any recurring topics that your audience were interested in plus anything that you notice could be improved next time around (you can also Like a tweet if you’ll remember to look there).

9. Reflect.

After everything you do, it’s good to spend even just a few minutes to reflect on what worked well, what didn’t, what you could do in the future, how it made you feel, whether you achieved your goals and any other ideas or revelations you had.

Hosting a Twitter chat isn’t half as scary as it sounds. To break you in gently, be sure to join others’ chats focusing particularly on what the host is doing and how people are responding to that. You could also volunteer to host an existing chat to take away steps 1-4 as a starting point. You’re guaranteed to learn what works best and what’s not necessary along the way, plus you’ll really start to connect with your ideal people and reap the other benefits that come with it. To make sure you put this guide into practice, I’ve created something for you…


Grab your free ‘Host An Epic Twitter Chat’ checklist!

Make hosting a Twitter chat a reality rather than a plan by downloading my free checklist! The checklist compliments #BuildYourTwittunity – The Ultimate Workbook for Planning, Hosting and Evaluating An Awesome Twitter Chat, and you can get 20% off as readers of ChloeSocial with the code CHLOE20. “This is so what I need” >>


How to Host a Twitter Chat - The Ultimate Guide + Free ChecklistRebecca Viner is a blog and personal brand coach, brand design consultant, and infopreneur with over 7 years of blogging experience. She’s here to give bloggers like you clarity and confidence in an overwhelming online world of advice through actionable content, strategic coaching, breakthrough consulting and awesome info-products. Have you been hustling hard but haven’t seen success for your blog/personal brand? Then #MakeRealProgress the ultimate workbook, group coaching and community program is perfect for you. Find out more here.

Connect with Rebecca: Website | Twitter | Pinterest

4 Comments

  • Joe

    I love participating in Twitter Chats! The chats make it easier to connect with people and build relationships.

  • Heather

    This was so helpful! I lucked out and found the perfect hashtag to use for my target market and I have no idea how it's still available! I have a question though, do you have any tips for how to host a Twitter chat for a product based business? I feel like most of these suggestions I can make work but I'm not sure how to ask questions based on my product launches necessarily because they aren't content based products. Thanks! Heather from Sun Over Vegas

    • Chloe

      Hi Heather! Sorry for the delay in response. Since your products are handcrafted, you could host a Twitter chat for other handmakers and ask questions, like how do they come up with new ideas for products, what's their process for launching a new product, and things like that. Let me know if you have any other questions!

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