Hashtags were ‘invented’ as a way for a group of people to follow a single conversation on Twitter. If you’ve ever seen a tweet with # preceding a word, you’ve seen a Hashtag. One of the greatest uses of Hashtags is to create real-time, ad hoc chat rooms or Tweet Chats. These are simply one of the best ways to gain value from your Twitter time, especially if you use Twitter for B2B sales prospecting.

Getting Started With Tweet Chats

  • To start a Tweet Chat, just determine what you want to use as your Hashtag (note, shorter is better because every tweet will carry the tag and the # sign) and share it with your friends or toss it out on Twitter.
  • Don’t want to host, but still want to play along, then just search Hashtag.org for words that might be in the name of a chat you’d like to sit in on. For instance, if I wanted to learn more about blogging, I might search for ‘blogchat‘ on Hashtags.org.
  • Now determine how you’ll converse. Using the standard Twitter web interface won’t cut it so I’d suggests you either use a client like Hootsuite or Chat Room specific sites like TweetChat or TweetGrid. If you’re using Hootsuite, you’ll need to create a search column using the # and hashtag conference room name as your search term and you’ll have to remember to type the Hashtag each time you tweet. If you’re like me and you want everything automated, you may want to lean towards TweetChat.

I’ve created a little How To video below to show you how to use both Hootsuite and TweetChat to participate in a Twitter Chat.

Where Can You Find a List of Twitter Chats?

There are lots of different lists available on the Interwebs… so you can just Google Twitter Chat and you’ll find a bunch. But because I’m such a giver, I’ll make it easy on you. Here is a list of Twitter Chats by day of the week. Go over and see if you see one that might prove a target rich environment for you. Yes, you’re welcome.

And that is it. Twitter Chats are all around. I really like BlogChat and TourismChat — for you tourism marketers. But you probably know of a few more…so add them here won’t you? And if you’ve seen a better interface for Twitter Chats, do share? Of late I’ve found some issues with my preferred TweetChat so I’m kind of interested in testing something else out. Let me know.