I officially have one “twitterview” (interview on Twitter) under my belt courtesy of Angelo Fernando. Normally, the best way to view an ongoing conversation is
the Hashtags site. Due to some technology challenges, Angelo was using Hootsuite and I was using Tweetdeck. A timing delay caused some overlap in the Q&A process.
Consequently, the conversation flow on Hashtags isn’t easy to discern. You can see the whole twitterview with the closest accuracy by going to Twitter and doing a search for #twitview.
My biggest challenge was staying within the 140 characters while providing valuable content. I exceeded my limit on several occasions and had to resort to the “…” and then quickly send another tweet with my remaining thought.
I’m far from an expert, but here are some tips to use as a starting point when you conduct/participate in your own twitterview.
Tips for twitterviews:
- Make sure you have a reciprocal follow relationship with the interviewer so you can confirm time and date via DM
- Agree to the time length of the interview or question maximum
- Agree to a hashtag and communicate it to followers
- Promote the interview on your blog and other social media sites
- If possible, get a scope of the twitterview so you can develop a few 140 character messages in advance – really less since you need to reference the hashtag in your tweets
- Have some tiny or tr.im URLs at hand – to pertinent blogs and websites (including your own, if it fits with the interview topic) so they are tweet-ready
If the Huffington Post has its way, twitterviews will not be a growing trend, but it’s always good to be prepared. That being said, as this practice continues to develop so will its PR use. I encourage you to share your tips and lessons learned here on BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas.
We have absolutely seen Twitter to be a growing trend and one that actually has been benificial to our meteoric growth.
That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve haven’t attended a professional development session in six months where Twitter hasn’t dominated the conversation.
We would love it if you could share some examples for our followers who are struggling with management not readily adopting the platform.
Johna,
You did a great job, responding fast. I liked the way you used the ellipsis at times to suggest there was a follow up tweet. It made me pause before firing off the next question, even though we had not agreed to this in advance. I guess, very soon, we will start developing some of these tricks -emoticons, even –to compensate for lack of being able to read body language etc that’s so important to interviews.
I have some lessons learned too that I will be posting on my blog. Thanks for doing the twinterview.
This is the social medium at it’s best — building on ideas… What do you think?