Last week I participated in my first twitterview, an interview that is conducted live on Twitter. I was invited to take part by 1230 The Women’s Company Ltd, a network for women in business that provides on and offline trading and business growth opportunities.
The twitterview was organised by Jackie Groundsell, the managing director, who provided me with a list of questions in advance, as well as useful guidelines to ensure the twitterview ran smoothly and created maximum impact across our respective networks.
Here are some practical tips that I picked up from the experience that you may find useful:
1. Call me old school, but my personal preference for tweeting, particularly when there’s to be a series of tweets, is to use a desktop or laptop. I found tweeting on my ipad to be quite cumbersome, but conscious that others may not encounter the same issue.
2. Something that Jackie recommended in her guidelines was that I should use a social media management tool, making it easier to follow the conversation thread and respond. I have long been an advocate for Hootsuite, purely because I find the dashboard easy to navigate, but there are other options available including TweetDeck.
3. Let your network know in advance that you are taking part in a twitterview by sharing the hashtag and topic that you will be discussing. In this case the topic was about my experience of running a business and the hashtag was #1230KISS, which Jackie uses exclusively for her weekly twitterviews. You do not need to confine the promotion of your twitterview to twitter; you can share the information across all of your social media networks to raise as much awareness as possible.
4. By providing the questions in advance of the twitterview, Jackie enabled me to think about my responses and check that I kept within the recommended limited of 120 characters. This character limit meant that Jackie could retweet my responses to her network and have enough space to include the hashtag too.
5. Taking part in a twitterview is great, but it is even better if you can capture your responses and then include them in a blog post, just like this one, so that you can share it with existing and new visitors to your website who missed the live twitterview. One tool that does this for you, and is very easy to use, is Storify.
If you missed my twitterview, you can read the transcript here. You can also listen to Jackie Groundsell in conversation with me on 21st October, when we will be discussing networking and business on Croydon Radio.