Twitter Tutorial - How I run my Twitter chats

How I run my Twitter chats. So every month I create a new Twitter chat with Dell where I'm answering questions from entrepreneurs. We pick a specific topic, it may be how to find your passion, how to stay motivated, how to get your first customer, and you basically have me for an hour on Twitter to talk about that subject, ask me whatever question you have, help answer questions from other people, and we get so much feedback and comments on all the Twitter chats that one of the participants who I know here in Toronto, local en-city entrepreneur Mark Elwood, wrote in to ask me a couple questions about them. So he wrote in to say, "Hi Evan, I attended the first bit of your motivational chat last week, then got onto a business development call that went right through the chat. I reviewed a few of the tweets afterwards, looked like there were some good conversations. Thanks for the inspiring ideas." His first question was, "Do you have many of the tweets pre-written?" So Mark, I don't. What I do with the pre-written tweets, they're twofold. One are I will invite everybody to the chat. So people who participated in last month's chat, I'll tweet them in advance, usually the day before, and say, hey, just a reminder, tomorrow we're doing our next chat. I'd love to have you join in on it. And that is a pre-tweet that is recorded and set usually to go like at 5-minute intervals. During the actual chat, there's only one series of quotes that I have pre-written, and they're from Michael Dell. I love Michael Dell, man. Michael Dell is such an inspiration to a lot of entrepreneurs, and I'm really fortunate to work with a company like Dell where they have an inspirational leader. So many of the companies, you have no idea who their leader or their founder is. They don't do a good job telling their story. But Michael Dell gets entrepreneurship, and he, he started his business with $1,000 and a dream. And he had to tell his parents, I don't want to become a doctor like you want me to become. I want to start my own business. And he had to prove them wrong. And so I love his story. I love all his advice, and I will take out a few of his quotes that I love, that I feel motivated and inspired by, and schedule those out throughout the chat, usually at 5-minute intervals. So the chat's from 12:30 to 1:30, it'll usually be like 12:35, 12:40, 12:45, there'll be a new Michael Dell quote. That is scheduled out. Everything else isn't. Everything else is crazy. By the time I log on to the chat, there's usually already a whole pile of questions. I'll answer the first one that Dell puts out, and then the rest is me like, mad typing away, answering questions, and it goes until the hour's up and beyond. So I wish there maybe was a way to schedule those out, but it's fun having the live interaction, and that's me. That's not my assistant, that's not anybody on my team. When I post from my Twitter account, that's me, that's my voice, those are my words, and it's all live, and that's what makes the Twitter chat really fun. His next question was, "Do you have some sort of tool that easily breaks your comments into 140 characters including the hashtag?" So for most Twitter chats to work, they have some hashtag. For us, it's #DelSMBChat, and so that's included at the end of every tweet that gets put up in the chat. There's no tool that I use to break down my thoughts into 140 characters. It's It's practice, you know, it's a mindset. It's now not writing for a blog, but writing for Twitter. It's something that you get better at. It's a discipline. It's trying to think in terms of 140 characters, right? And most of my tweets are also in response to other people, so I have to factor in their handles too. So I got their handles, I have the hashtag, and then I only have that much space for my thoughts. It's just practicing being more concise, and as I've done more and more on Twitter, you get better at it, just like anything else, any other skill. You practice getting better at it, and, and you will. And his last question was, one final thing, I only use the regular Twitter homepage to follow conversations. It's not that easy. 19 new comments arrive and you have to scroll down to see the newest of the bunch. What add-on do you use? So I love using a tool called TwitterFall. And why I love it is it'll show you all the posts that come in with the hashtag, and it will pause as you're going along. And if you're responding to somebody, it pauses, and then after you stop responding, the new ones start flowing. And so if you go to TwitterFall and you use whatever hashtag you're trying to follow along with, it makes it super easy to see the conversations that are coming in and respond to people. It also is a great tool for showing on conferences or big TVs if you're putting on an event. You can load up TwitterFall and put whatever hashtag, and as people respond, it'll show up on the screen. It's great for display purposes too. Totally free. I'm a big fan. I have no involvement in the company other than being a happy user. The guys at Dell use Hootsuite, and I use Hootsuite to do the pre-tweets. I use Hootsuite on a daily basis to manage my Twitter account, and you find all power Twitter users they're not using the Twitter homepage, they're using other tools. Hootsuite is one of the most common ones, and you can set up a new list using that search term, whatever the hashtag is that you're using, and it'll show up on there as you go through. I've been trying to get them to move towards TwitterFall. We'll see, we'll see what happens. But those are the tools that we use, TwitterFall and Hootsuite. So thanks, Mark, for the great questions. Hopefully that helped. For those of you who are interested in checking out the Twitter chats and being involved, I'd love to have you. It's always a fun time. You can check out the upcoming chats at evancarmichael.com/twitter with the lowercase, or everything lowercase, and I'll see you on the next chat. Believe. For those of you watching the video, you can subscribe to the channel, see more videos just like this. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.