Twitter chats

Twitter hasn't been a great traffic source for us. Part of the reason is that I haven't been consistent enough with posts, but even on days with higher volume, we aren't getting a lot of referrals from Twitter. There's a lot of volume out there, and it's hard to break through the noise.

I was thinking that participating in Twitter chats might be a more effective way to connect with people. For anyone who's unfamiliar, the idea of a Twitter chat is that you set up a hashtag and a predetermined time, usually about an hour, and people talk about a given topic. You tag all of your posts in the conversation with the hashtag, and you set up a search for that hashtag to see everyone else's contributions.

We can't use these for direct promotion -- jumping into these chats with "check out our website!" will just get people pissed off and reporting our account for spam -- but engaging in conversations where WF or its members can contribute to the talk may have potential.

This can work in two ways --

• We participate in the chat as @Word4ge, but with whoever does it speaking as themselves, and look to gain Twitter followers rather than immediate visitors to the site. Better for geeky topics, shouldn't be used for controversial ones.
• We find chats where direct links to WF actually are topics and not spam. (In this case it doesn't matter if it's done via @Word4ge or somebody's personal account.

Here are some of the chats I've found in listings ...

#AmWriting -- All day, every day. A virtual water cooler for writers. Might be a place to talk about The Workshop ... although it would really be better if a few Workshop participants tweeted their own threads into the chat.

#BuffyS9Chat -- Thursday from 5-6 p.m. Pacific. Anybody reading this? (As big a Buffy nerd as I am, I haven't gotten beyond the very beginning of the S8 comics.)

#SciFiChat -- Well, duh. Only problem is it's on Friday from 1-3 p.m. Central Time.

#StoryCraft -- writing chat on Sundays from 10-11 a.m. Central.

We could also try setting up our own chats, but that would require seeding the initial pool of participants with a bunch of current members to get things going.

Thoughts?

Yeah, I've been noticing some of these lately, they are kind of fun to follow, and when I've participated, I've usually picked up some followers to my own account. I think it's a good idea.

Sounds good. Do we have enough twitterers? I don't do much but retweet, but am trying to get more into it.

I just learned about .@ a week ago!

Well, just participating in other people's chats using the WF handle doesn't require any kind of critical mass. Hosting our own would. (And participating in the first few rounds of a WF-hosted chat might be a bigger erosion of the WF/RL wall than a lot of people would want.)

Done with this?

Yes?

No?

As far as I know. I'll give it a shot when I can.

I say move to releases, and let's get some other twitterati in on the conversation.