Are you a blogger who has been invited to a Twitter “party” or “chat?”
Are you a person who follows your favorite brands on social media? This post
will help you to easily attend a Twitter party or chat with your favorite brands.
I’m hoping it will be a super simple guide to accomplish your goal of
interacting with your brand during a Twitter party.
First things first. You will need:
A
Twitter account which will give you a Twitter handle (username).
High
speed internet or WI-FI access.
It would also be nice to have uninterrupted quiet time to participate,
but we all know how that works…
 |
| Start your tweeting! |
What if you don’t have a Twitter account? Set up is super easy.
First, go to Twitter and set up an account. On the home page you’ll see “New to
Twitter? Sign up” – fill in your information including your name, email
address, and password you want to use for Twitter. You’ll be asked to go to
your email and open an email from Twitter, and you’ll follow a link to validate
your account (and prove you’re not a spammer). You’ll be asked to create a
username – this is your Twitter handle, what you will use to send messages and
how you’ll be known to others. You can easily create one based upon your name
or you can make one up, just like when you created your email address. Once
your account is validated, you’ll want to post a photo for your account
(usually personal photos work best but photos of your cat or avatars will
work). Click on the Me tab on Twitter, and hover over the area where the photo
goes (top middle of your page). Click on where the photo goes and you’ll be
able to upload a photo from your computer. You can also edit your profile and
add information about yourself or your blog or your company. You can also add
Header Photos and get all fancy with your page, but I won’t go into that here.
OK so you have an account, now what? We follow Twitter handles
(usernames) with @ marks. You’re basically telling Twitter “I’m talking @ so
and so.” So if I want to tag (tweet at) someone, I put @theirusername in my
tweet. You can find friends or your brand by using the Search bar at the top.
Search for people’s names, brands, anything, and something will pop up. Click
on it and you can click Follow on a profile and poof, you’re following this
person! Their tweets (posts) will show up in your feed (which will be on the
home page).
What’s a tweet? It’s a 140 character post. If you’re on
Facebook, you know that you can update your status and that it can be as long
as you want. On Twitter, which is a micro-blogging platform (read micro:
small), you can only use 140 characters (including spaces). So tweets will be
short. You’ll see tweets that include a # - this is a hashtag. We can use
hashtags before words or phrases on Twitter and people will use these hashtagged
words or phrases to search for what they want to learn or find. For example, I
have a giveaway on our blog right now for a Diono Radian RXT car seat. If I
wanted to tweet about it (which I do), then I could write “#Enter to #win a
@Diono Radian RXT #carseat on the #blog!” This way, the tweet gets posted on
Diono’s Twitter feed (so anyone who follows Diono can see it) and anyone who
searches for “enter,” “win,” “carseat,” or “blog” could find my post. #Giveaway
is always a good one to use to get people to find your blog giveaways as well.
I will also include a link to enter the giveaway (and the link should be short,
so use a link shortener tool which you can find by doing a Google search for
“link shortener”).
And now a Twitter party. So now back to our regularly schedule
programming about attending Twitter parties. A brand or company will plan a
Twitter party and will invite it’s readers/followers/customers to participate.
A lot of times they’ll do this to answer questions from a large group, introduce
a new product, or give away products. Attending a party can get overwhelming
really fast, and here’s why. Let’s say that our blog, Mamas Around the House,
is throwing a Twitter party. We invite all our readers (we have over 3,000
Facebook followers) and let’s say half of them show up to the party (holy cow
that would rock). That’s 1,500 people on Twitter at once talking to us and
talking about something such as a giveaway we’re doing. Imagine 1,500 people
sitting in a room all talking (tweeting) at once. It can be chaos (with a
capital K). I’ll tell you how to stay sane during a party in a second.
Party Announcement. The announcement for the party will include two things: who’s hosting
(the Twitter handle of the host of the party, the person who is going to be
tweeting to the readers) and a hashtagged topic to follow. Basically when I
tell my readers to use a certain hashtagged word, I’m putting all of us who
tweet using that hashtag in a “chat room” (just like the old school chat
rooms). You can follow a hashtagged word and only see posts that have that
hashtag, so that means that you can focus on posts that relate to your party.
If I were throwing a Twitter party, I might email and Facebook my followers and
say, “Tonight at 9 p.m. Central we’re throwing a Twitter party! Liz from Mamas
Around the House is hosting – follow her at @MamaArndthHouse. We’ll be using
#ilovetwitterparties to follow each other’s conversation. See you there!” So we
have our host (@mamaarndthhouse) and our hashtag to follow
(#ilovetwitterparties). We’re ready to…party.
Suggestion: After three years of doing these parties, here’s what I do. I open up
Twitter on one tab in my Internet browser. I log in, and I go to the host’s
page. I make sure I’m following them so that I can tweet at them (i.e., put
their handle in my tweets). This allows me to see the host’s questions and
reply to them by clicking Reply and tweeting back to them/answering their
question (be sure to use the hashtag or you’re not “in the room”). In another
tab I open an application that is designed for Twitter parties/chats such as
Tweet Chat or something else (Google Twitter chat and a few will come up but I
use TweetChat most often). Put in your hashtag. This will show you all of the
tweets that are using that hashtag. It can get to be a lot. And they can
refresh pretty quickly meaning that you’re trying to read someone’s post and
click Reply and poof it disappears because the page refreshed and there were 20
more tweets (and 20 more…and 20 more…). To stay organized, follow the host,
answer their questions, and only go back to the full feed tab every once in a
while. If it’s a slow moving chat you’ll be fine, but as I said before, the
more people, the crazier the party.
OK, now you’re ready – go attend a Twitter party/Twitter chat! Have fun
and stay sane :) If you enjoyed this post, please share it with friends, on Twitter, on Facebook, or on Pinterest. Thanks!
-Liz
