The ‘social’ aspect of social media sometimes gets forgotten ~ tweeting to share links, pictures or all kinds of other cool content is fun, but it is more fun to actually socialize with others.

This Saturday after a succesful ‘social media networking for non profits’ event, hosted by @frith64 being @Tweet4OK, a group of fervent twitter enthousiasts decided to give birth to the first Okanagan twitter chat.

Mondays at 7PM everyone can follow the timeline searching the hashtag #okchat and join the conversation online using twitter.

A great tool to do this is Tweetchat.  It automatically refreshes and finds all tweets that have the #okchat hashtag or any other tag you fill out in the box at the top of the program. If you reply or tweet from tweetchat, it automagically adds the hashtag to your tweet so you can’t forget.

We noticed however, that participants that have a protected timeline will not show up in tweetchat. When the chat goes really fast, it may also start to hiccup and miss a couple of updates, so always have a search column in tweetdeck or hootsuite ready as fallback.

The first #okchat was a great success! Lasting about one hour, #okchat reached the ‘trending topic in Canada’ status with nearly 500 tweets by nearly 30 participants.  The open structure of twitter sending the hashtag to all followers of all participants had quite a few others bump into the conversation. They would not have found it if not for Twitter…

See y’all next Monday at 7PM on #okchat!

Image by @HighTechDad