Tips to Manage Twitter Chats such as #edchat and #ndedchat

During an active Twitter Chat it is hard to follow all the Tweets and different conversations that develop. Sometimes you might even miss the question that others are starting to answer.

I use TweetDeck when I am participating in #edchat, #ndedchat or other active Twitter Chats. I set up multiple columns, each with a specific purpose.

The main column is searching for all Tweets that contain the hashtag for the Twitter Chat.

A second column is set to search for the same hashtag, but I use it to find secondary words. It might be "Q1" because I missed the first question by joining late, or it might have passed by without my seeing it. It might be "A1" to find all the (correctly tagged) answers to a specific question. It might be a term you want to search for to follow a side conversation, such as "common core" or "genius time."

A third column is set up with a list of people whose Tweets I want to pull out of the Twitter stream. In my example, two of the people in my list are the organizers of #ndedchat

There are times when I might have even more columns open, each devoted to a specific search term that I want to pull out of the stream.

I always have at least one column open and devoted to the specific hashtags I want to follow, such as #edchat, #commoncore, #mathchat, or #edtech.

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