3 Reasons You Should Be Participating in Twitter Chats

If you have never participated or hosted a Twitter Chat you are missing out on the best part of this social network. With GVI hosting our first one today, I decided to earmark a few chats to see what it is all about and if it would even be worth our time. Conclusion: The best decision we have made.

1. Have Meaningful Conversations and Engagement with Your Customer

 If you still think social is all about the sweet, sweet likes it’s time to stop living in 2010. Social in 2016 is all about meaningful conversations and engagements. Twitter chats give you this in abundance. After participating in Travel Massive’s #TMResponsibleTravel Chat, we had a lot more engagement than we had on a normal day.

 It gave us a platform to have real-time discussions with people who care about the same issues as us, form meaningful relationships, communicate our brand promises and explain on a more personal level how our volunteering programs fit into that niche.

 By the end of the chat, we had new followers and a lot more engagement because it wasn’t been lost in the endless Twitter drone. People were actively looking at the hashtag and going through the tweets to see what people were saying. In short: they were looking for engagement. They wanted to like, retweet and be a part of the conversation. As a brand, we didn’t have to create this environment, it was already there for us. We just needed to take advantage.

 If you aren’t sure where to find Twitter Chats to jump into, take a look at this helpful website, Tweet Reports. There is a chat for almost anything, but beware they don’t seem to remove chats that no longer take place.

 2. Get Your Personal Brand Out There

 From a personal branding perspective, I have had oodles of fun on Twitter Chats. I took part in the #TMResponsibleTravel Chat at the same time as I was tweeting for GVI. Yes, I am insane, but I have a lot of opinions and I wanted to promote GVI from a staff point of view as well. It was a crazy hour, but at the end of it I walked away with a couple of new followers, a lot of retweets and likes plus an invite by a travel blogger in the UK to explore London with her when I visit in March. In terms of who started following me, it was mainly made up of people in the travel industry. Which is fantastic. It was an amazing networking experiencing without having to deal with people face to face.

I saw the exact same thing happen when I participated in #ExpediaChat and #TravelChatSA. By the end of both chats, I had met a couple of interesting travel bloggers, had great conversations with brands and now have an invitation to go around exploring Cape Town restaurants with a fellow content writer.

 I would never have met these people in real life or have had the chance to have such beautiful engaging conversations around travel if it were not for these chats. As a consumer, I’ve discovered more about different destinations that I’ve never heard of before. Which brings me to my biggest point:

 3. Twitter Chats Are A Gold Mine For User Recommendations

 
The number one thing that happens during these chats is users and brands sharing information and endorsing their experiences. I now have a list on my phone of new restaurants I should try and I found out that there is such a thing as vegan biltong. The user that told me this also linked me to a bunch of brands that make it. You gotta to love the sound of free marketing.

But what I didn’t see was brands making the most of this situation. There were countless brands being mentioned who were not part of the chat and some who didn’t even have Twitter. Talk about missed opportunities.

This is the essence of social selling. You need to find out where your customers are hanging out and engage with them. You need to know when you are being talked about online. There were a handful of brands who were prepared for  these chats and people were taking in their marketing messages because they wanted to find out more about travel destinations, things to do there and which restaurant they should try next. 

In conclusion, you need to get onto Twitter and take part in what is probably the most valuable part of the platform. There is nothing to loose, besides an hour of your time and everything to gain.

In my next post, I will be discussing how our first Twitter Chat went. I will be discussing if it lived up to my greatest experiences I've had so far as a participant, some juicy engagement statistics, how we promoted our chat and how we plan to improve for our next chat.