Twitter #chats, the most underrated social media resource.

This will serve as my public apology to my wife.  I’m sorry.

Last night, instead of spending time with her between 8-9 pm, I was in the office on the computer participating in #chatmixer on Twitter.  The event was unprecedented in the history of the social media platform, as participants in all the regular Twitter chats were all talking to each other in one giant chat.

If you don’t take advantage of the regular chat sessions on Twitter, you are missing out one of the great educational and social opportunities any social media platform has to offer.

The chats, there are dozens of them, take place at regular weekly times, and range in topics from agriculture, to young adult literature, to people with natural hair, to small business marketing, to dogs, to summer camps.  Of course, many of them deal with topics I’m interested in like PR, social media and marketing.

During these chats people with like interests get to discuss those topics and meet each other at 140 characters intervals.

These chats are enabled by third-party applications like tweetchat.com and tweetgrid.com, which allows for real-time searches of Tweets.  Every tweet in a chat is followed by a special hashtag selected for the chat to make the chat easier to follow.  For example, the small business marketing chats started by my friends from Florida, John and Chrisanne Sternal (congrats on the baby, btw) is #smbiz.

All you have to do is select a chat, go to the Twitter chat program of your choice, log-in, enter the right hashtag, and follow the stream.  It takes a bit of patience at first because it seems like the Twitter version of a Chinese fire drill.

But there are great things that can happen as a result:

• You meet a lot of great people with similar interests and get to talk to them.
• It’s a great way to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter.
• It’s a great to learn from other people.
• It’s a great way to recruit (we have two informational interviews scheduled this week).
• It’s a great way to meet potential business partners or collaborators.
• It’s a great way to find your social media mentors.

So you may ask, how to you get to know about this chats?  You can either stumble on them by following the Twitter stream or someone could aggregate them all into one place.  Someone has.

Here’s a link to a Google Doc that lists all the current chats and their subjects and their times.  It is a living breathing document and you need a Google log-in to access it but it is the best resource to discover these great online sessions.

I urge you to find one and try it out.  It is one of the things I tell people about when they say “I just don’t get Twitter.”

To get Twitter, you have to engage.  This is a great way to do that.

Thanks again to Valerie Simon and Justin Goldsbororgh (folks I’ve met through Twitter chats) for arranging last night’s #chatmixer.  It was a blast.