Recently, I was asked to be a guest speaker on a Twitter Chat. I had never participated in one before, but I found it to be a lot of fun and an interesting way to share ideas and meet new people with similar business interests (in this case, startup essentials for small business was the topic). If you are new to the Twitter Chat concept, here are a few tips to help you determine if it’s a useful tool for your business.

The idea is rather simple. A Twitter Chat is a hosted conversation where users interested in a particular topic all follow a designated hashtag at a specific date and time (Editor’s recommendation: #ppcchat happens every Tuesday at 9am Pacific Time). This makes it easy for anyone looking in to identify the chat and participate. You can even just “lurk” and not actively participate in a Twitter Chat at first.

The easiest way to participate is through a dashboard tool like HootSuite or TweetDeck. I found this to be incredibly useful for keeping track of all the incoming questions and answers during the fast, one-hour conversation.

Here’s how it worked: I have four columns set up on my TweetDeck: All Friends, Mentions, Direct Messages and Search. Since the Twitter Chat used the same hashtag at the end of each tweet, all I had to do was enter that hashtag into the search bar. I could then easily see all the new tweets in the conversation coming up without having to continually refresh the page (which you would have to do on Twitter.com). I could also easily see people who were sending me a Direct Message and the @mentions during the Tweet Chat, all on the same screen.

My goal was to try and answer as many questions as I could with solid answers. The hard part is answering in a cohesive series of 140-character tweets! Also, juggling answers while keeping an eye on the new questions from the moderator and the direct message questions from other participants was sometimes challenging, but the conversations were really interesting.

When I first signed up to do this, I wasn’t sure about the business benefits. But after experiencing a flurry of insightful tweets from participants and seeing how witty small biz pros can be, I’m hooked! Plus, the conversations continued far beyond the one-hour Twitter Chat. In fact, I’ve had several follow up conversations with participants both via Twitter and email, and I found some interesting new contacts to follow that now follow @HP_SmallBiz. In addition, I was able to direct participants back to posts on this blog as a way to expand my answers beyond the 140 character limit and provide more targeted explanations.

Have you participated in or hosted a Twitter Chat before? What are your thoughts?  Share them below!

Thanks for reading,

Melissa Zieger

Melissa Zieger (@HP_SmallBiz) is the editor-in-chief of HP's SMB blog, 367 Addison Avenue and a worldwide public relations manager for HP's Personal Systems Group.