How to host a Twitter chat? Here’s a list of Tasks You need to do

Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2015 and has been updated in January 2023 with fresh information.

Hosting a Twitter chat is a lot of work. It is fun and rewarding to those consistently either hosting or attending it, but it is, still, WORK.

Ready to work?

First…

Goal/s and Resources

Determine your why for hostina chats. And take stock of what you have in terms of time and other skills needed to get it going.

A few questions that are worth exploring before hosting a Twitter chat.

• Why are you doing the Twitter chat? What is your goal?
• Is it beneficial for your business? How so?
• Would the topic be unique and relevant?
• Do you have enough followers to invite?
• Do you have the capacity?
• How are you going to find guest-hosts?
• Do you have tools needed to run it? Less learning curve?
• How are you going to measure the success of what you are doing?

Hosting a Twitter Chat: 51 Tasks Before during and after the Twitter chat

Before Your Twitter Chat: What to do

1. Join a few Twitter chats before hosting one. Watch how others do it. There are lessons that are better caught than taught. Experience is an exceptional teacher.
2. Identify what the Twitter chat is about and use that as your chat’s pitch when inviting others to join you either as an attendee or as a guest.
3. Invite your followers, employees and other tweeters that you want to be part of your Twitter chat. Be relentlessly tenacious because not everyone will be up for it. To grow your Twitter chat, you just have to keep on people reminding about it. It is a LOT of work.
4. Determine how much shameless plugs you would do when you run the chat. Tweeters are smart people. They get fatigued with too much shameless plugs. I do. At #USAMfgHour, we kindly ask our hosts to limit links shared from their site to up too two only.
5. Automate invitation if you can.
6. Call-out Twitter niches you think would be benefit from the chat. You can use hashtags for that or tag them.
7. “Two is better than one.” Instead of just doing the planning alone, invite co-hosts to share the load. One serves as the host, the other as the moderator, or whatever the situation may be. The #USAMfgHour chat of which I am one of the Co-Hosts has this down. Use your cohorts’ superpower, a.k.a. strengths and skills. Determine who does what before you launch the Twitter chat event.
8. Create a content calendar for your topics.
9. Invite guest-hosts whose knowledge and expertise would be beneficial to your community.
10. Create an image that captures key details of the chat. It is better that this image comes from you and not your guest? Why? For brand consistency and it takes the load off your guest too. The image could include information like the chat topic, the Twitter chat’s hashtag, the schedule, the time zone, the hosts, and co-hosts, guest/s. Pin it to your Twitter profile. Re-tweet it often before the Twitter chat so other people will have the chance to join or schedule it.
11. Invite with topics ready when inviting others.
12. Prepare questions and post it on your website and social media platforms. It helps to set expectations. Also, it lends some depth to the Twitter chat conversation when people are prepared.
13. Have a plan on what to do with trolls and hijackers. (Ignore, respond or block?)
14. Share and re-share invitation as a reminder.
15. Share any helpful tool that you recommend your Twitter chat community could use beside the Twitter app.
16. Use one Twitter chat hashtag consistently. Research the hashtag. See if it is already in use, or not; and if in use, in what context? There are a lot of horror stories about hashtags that have unsavory usage.
17. Claim a Twitter account for that chat. Is this even necessary? Some do this, others don’t. But if your Twitter chat is for the long haul, here is one story. Someone on Twitter attempted to steal the #USAMfgHour chat from the group by creating a Twitter account that looked similar to the #USAMfgHour chat. Thankfully, one of the cohorts had the foresight to create a Twitter account associated with the chat. So that Twitter account helped take care of that besides the many friends of the manufacturing chat that helped report the poser.
18. Post the tweet chat calendar on different social media platform or your website for your other fans or followers to see and hopefully join.
19. Determine what tool to use to manage the Twitter Chat. Also, make sure you have a backup when the tool acts up. Trust me, it happens.
20. Prepare a guide on how the conversation should flow and share it. Example: Q1 (for question #1), and A1 for an answer to question #1 and what hashtag to include
21. Plan on how long you want to camp out on each question.
22. Pick easy and helpful topics. The chat is what it is a light conversation that is helpful to everyone. It is not a thesis defense kind of conversation.
23. Avoid inside jokes and jargons unless it is a clique group chat. It could throw off attendees that are not familiar with such unnecessary nuance in a chat. I am talking from experience here.
24. Finalize details with your other co-hosts and guest-hosts, including roles, timing of tweets and expectations.
25. On Twitter, create a list of those who you think would be your potential participants of the Twitter chat so you can focus on engaging with them. And then you can use that list to remind them about it. You can pre-schedule the Twitter invitation to that list using a social media management tool of your choice. This is a huge time-saver.
26. Prepare 6-8 questions beforehand, complete with your hashtags. Six questions should be plenty, including an ice breaker or two.

During your Twitter chat

27. Post questions both as texts and as image. If you just use image only, it could be hard to read, so posting the Twitter chat question would be an enormous help to attendees. Also, using BOTH as images and texts is eye-catching.
28. Be there early to welcome participants.
29. Be polite; stay polite.
30. Fire-up the Twitter chat. If you have a Twitter guest host, take to task the retweeting and favoriting of tweets. You support your guest and your community that way. It is not about you. Social media is about THEM, although it is YOUR chat.
31. Endeavor to engage with other Tweeters, if you are the host. Spread out a bit and engage with other participants.
32. Share a quick guide about how the chat should go before posting your first question and then re-share it during the second half for those who jumped in later. This is to keep things consistent.
33. Acknowledge participants of your chat. Make it known that you see them.
34. Prepare everyone for the next question. Just say it so, just to keep the flow going.
35. It won’t hurt to once again tell your Twitter attendees what tool you are using for the chat and to not forget the correct hashtag. There is only one correct hashtag. The chat’s hashtag.
36. Frequently, remind your community what hashtag to use so tweets don’t fall into the cracks.
37. Relax, it is just a Twitter chat. You don’t have to elbow yourself in.
    
    Relax, it is just a twitter chat.Click To Tweet
38. Copy and paste what you did in #26 instead of typing it.
39. If you are hosting the chat by your self, pre-schedule/automate your questions so you have time to engage and answer questions.
40. If your guest is in a different part of the country, or in a totally different timezone, it is sometimes better to have other communication tools open like Skype, email, your phone, or FaceTime. This is in case something happens like the internet going down, etc, suddenly. Or if Twitter is down. This happened to a chat I was hosting for a client, hence I added this here.
41. Regarding #40, there are other things that may not go as planned, so just be ready to adapt and pivot in the middle of a chat.

After Your Twitter chat

42. Summarize the Twitter chat by highlighting interesting and helpful answers and repurpose it into a different content format for you to redistribute.
43. Ask your audience for topics that would interest them.
44. Confirm with the next guest (if you have one) the schedule and topic of next chat.
45. Check metrics that shows how the event went. 
46. Follow up/end with a thank-you.
47. Do a quick review of the Twitter chat in case you have missed a question or to continue with the conversation. 
48. For SEO, keep an optimized summary of chat on your website. That is if your website is easy to update. If not, post it somewhere where it is public so you can refer to it, e.g. LinkedIn Pulse.
    
49. Measure. Measure. Measure. What should you measure? Among other social media metrics: note the number of participants, the number of tweets produced by that chat, and the chat’s reach. And even the quality of the chat.
50. Evaluate what worked and what did not for efficiencies.
51. If applicable, add an after Twitter chat Facebook live event video to your group or Facebook page to keep the Twitter chat party going.

Conclusion

You can prepare hosting a Twitter chat using this guide, but one thing you need to remember is that sometimes things do not go as planned.

And if that happens, remember these:

• Take a deep breath and host the Twitter chat like a pro that you are.
• Don’t get stuck in making sure all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed when unexpected circumstances happen.
• It is a chat. While we want it to be as smooth as possible and top-notch as possible, remember that it is, again, a CHAT, a Twitter “happy hour” so, kickback and loosen up.
• Make sure that you are having fun yourself. Fun is contagious!

Your Turn

Do you have questions on how to host a Twitter chat? Have you hosted one before? Do you need help to plan your own Twitter chat from start to finish? Are you on the fence about Twitter chat? You can check out my tips on the benefits of joining a Twitter chat for your company.