How to Set Up Twitter Interview with Influencers (+Free Guidelines Template!)

A Twitter chat can have several forms. One of the easiest and most efficient ones is a Twitter interview:

• A Twitter hashtag-driven interview develops your relations with the niche influencer(s) you invite as a featured guest
• It puts your brand in the center of the conversation, thus establishing your voice and building the awareness
• It increases your reach because the influencer(s) will be interacting with you and thus spread the message to their followers

How to Set up a Twitter Interview?

There may be different ways of approaching this. Here are some possible steps.

Optional: Set up your new project

If you are planning to turn your influencer-driven interviews into a separate project, consider setting up your new site for that. This way you will be able to brand this project separately from your main site, so you’ll have more freedom.

You can set up a one-page site using your current hosting. This site will also let you find a cool, yet affordable domain name:

Step #1 Identify the Influencers

1. Identify the influencers and topic authorities and approach them on Twitter asking if they are interested in that kind of one-time commitment. You will be surprised how many of them will be willing to participate: This is a great ego-bait tactic!

Step #2 Identify the topic

2. Once you have some responses (maybe even one), brainstorm an interesting topic that would match the influencers’ interest and/or expertise.

Step #3 Set day and time

3. Follow up with those who were interested proposing your topic and giving your day & time options. (You can use WordPress calendars for that)

Step #4 Find a Hashtag

4. When creating a Twitter chat room, you’ll need to define your hashtag (which will also be your unique room URL). Hashtag is used to aggregate all the chat conversations in one stream: Whenever the hashtag is included, the tweet goes into the chat (no matter where it originates from).

Here are some tips:

• The shorter the better: Mind that this hashtag will be included in each tweet, so the fewer characters it contains, the more characters will be allowed for each tweet within the chat.
• Come up with something unique: Search Twitter to make sure your hashtag is not being used by anyone else.
• Come up with something branded and easy to type and remember.

Step #5 Send Your Official Chat Guidelines to the Participants

6. Once you have a room, time and the confirmed speakers, send all of them the URL to the room, time and 5-6 questions you are going to ask them.

Tip: Usually questions are marked as Q1, Q2, etc, and the speakers are encouraged to label the answers as A1, A2, etc, accordingly. That’s how Twitter chats are made easier to follow.

The best idea is to send your guests some official participation guidelines. I have one template here. You can customize and use it!

That’s how your influencers’ tweets will go to a separate column. That makes a Twitter chat easier to follow!

Step #6 Create Summary Article (+ Re-Package!)

8. Wrap all the answers together and create an article summing up your chat for all those who missed it or who were late. That’s how Twitter interview ends up a popular group interview on your blog.

Ideas! Get even more creative! Here’s how Twitter chats may become a visual asset for your blog:

• Create a summary video of the best tips mentioned on the chat.
• Create an infographic featuring most useful tips and tricks. Example

Again, if you like the experiment, go ahead and make it a tradition!