Tips for a Successful Twitter Chat

Coordinating a Twitter chat is a great tactic to generate online conversations about your client and its campaign. Based on your goals, chats are good for driving clicks to landing

pages, increasing social followings, promoting new products or services, highlighting spokespersons and more.

LCWA’s social media team regularly coordinates successful Twitter chats for clients in numerous industries, accomplishing a variety of goals. Here are some tips we recommend to make any chat a campaign highlight: 

• Partner with an influencer, blogger or media member, who has a social following and reaches your target audience, to serve as the host. This is a good way to increase participation, excitement and credibility.
• Delegate roles and responsibilities, such as having the host tweet questions, the client’s handle share information and a client expert/spokesperson respond organically to participants’ questions from his or her personal handle.
• Designate a simple, catchy hashtag to tie the conversation together and get across the campaign message. Use the correct tone, too, such as branded for a product launch versus general for an awareness campaign.
• Promote the chat on social media (on client, host and expert accounts) with engaging content and clear direction on how to join.
• Offer a chance to win prizes to get a nice boost in participation.
• Draft a script of numbered questions and responses, but remain flexible in order to answer incoming questions and remarks. 
• Keep the tweets short to increase retweets and responses. 
• Run the chat for one hour or less, and choose a time when your target audience is active on social media.
• Use a hashtag tracking site to make following the chat easier and for gathering post-chat metrics. 
• Set up a conference call with anyone on the client-side who needs to provide approval on responses or wants to follow the chat, and/or to help flag tweets for spokespersons to respond to. 
• Answer participants’ questions quickly and look for ways to engage with the rest of the chat – including asking follow-up questions or sharing an acknowledgement.
• Give a clear closing message and site referral, and don't forget to thank everyone for participating to end the chat.