I really enjoy participating in tweetchats…if you’ve never done it, it’s a great way to connect with others who have similar interests and it’s a natural community builder. It’s easy to participate, but it is slightly more challenging to host/moderate. I am fortunate enough to moderate two very busy chats, SMChat on Wednesdays at 1pm ET and the SOBCon chat on the third Thursday of the month. Along the way, I’ve come up with some tips to offer that will be helpful if you find yourself in the moderation hot seat.
- Do a framing post and share beforehand. Include the questions that you will cover in the chat – label them Q1, Q2. etc.
- Try to keep the number of questions to 5. For an hour chat, you will have a few minutes of introductions, about 10 minutes per question and a few minutes of wrap-up.
- Pre-schedule your questions to tweet out using an application like hootsuite (affiliate link) or similar. Set them to begin 10 minutes after the chat starts and every 10 minutes thereafter. Make sure you remember to hashtag them with the name of your chat. This really helps to stay on topic.
- Use twebevent, tweetchat, tweetgrid to automatically hashtag your tweets and monitor the chat stream.
- Keep a second window open to monitor your mentions, so that if someone asks you a question, you don’t miss it in the flood of tweets.
- Last, but not least, if you have someone being inappropriate/rude/too self-promotional – remind them very firmly what the chat is about and if they do not cease, then ask them to leave the chat. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
Happy Friday, have a great weekend and remember Keep It Simple!
Amber Cleveland's Blog 
Hi Amber,
Thanks for mentioning HootSuite as a tool for Twitter chats! Just wanted to let you know that HootSuite actually hosts it’s own Twitter chat on social media once a week through the HootSuite University program – Tuesdays at 2pm ET/11am PT, we’d love to have you join!
Hoot hoot,
Taylor from HootSuite University