The first Wednesday night Twitter Chat, #NewYearBooks, discussing books and our New Year’s Resolutions will be tonight! The time is 9pm Eastern / 8pm Central / 2am GMT — figure out your time zone using the Time Zone Converter.

This post will offer some tricks and tips about participating in Twitter Chats, but first, for anyone new to the New Year’s Resolution Reading Challenge, here are all the links to previous posts:

• New Year’s Resolution Reading Challenge. The introduction and link list for sign-up posts.
• Reading and my New Year’s Resolutions. My sign-up post.
• Weekend Cooking: New Year’s Resolutions. A request for book suggestions to support food-related resolutions — with some great ideas in the comments.
• Christmas bokeh. A request for book suggestions to support the resolution “improve my photography” — if you’re a photographer we could still use some ideas here.
• New Year’s Resolution Reading Challenge — Review Links. The post where we will link reviews of books read to support our New Year’s Resolutions.

Okay, on to the Twitter Chat.

A Twitter Chat is facilitated by everyone using the same hash tag for a conversation. In our case, the hash tag is #NewYearBooks. You can follow along in Twitter or whatever client you use for tweeting by searching on the hash tag and remembering to add #NewYearBooks to each of your tweets.

A much easier way to participate though is to use TweetChat. Sign in with your Twitter account and type in the hash tag NewYearBooks. Now, you will see all previous tweets with that hash tag. Even better, any tweet you write in that message window will automatically have the #NewYearBooks hash tag appended to it so you don’t have to remember it.

Our Twitter Chat will follow the format that most chats that I’ve participated in use. The first 10 minutes will be for introductions. A question will be raised every 10 minutes during the hour, beginning with Q1 and ending with Q5. People who are really on the ball will preface answers with A1 for answers to question one (Q1), A2 for answers to question two (Q2), etc., but no worries if you forget.

It is accepted and expected that we will go off topic, especially if there are fewer than ten participants. Larger groups try to stay more on topic so that it doesn’t get too confusing, but with small groups, going off topic just adds to the fun.

If you forget to add the hash tag #NewYearBooks, you’ll probably be ignored because many of us won’t see that tweet at all. Don’t take it personally, just tweet it again with the hash tag.

It’s helpful, but not required, to copy all or part of a tweet that you’re replying to in your tweet so that everyone can follow the conversation. Traditionally, you write your response, followed by RT (ReTweet) or MT (Modified reTweet), then the twitter handle of the original tweeter, then all or part of the original tweet. TweetChat makes this easy. When you hit the retweet button (right-pointing arrow), the original tweet appears in the message window where you can add your response to the beginning of the tweet.

If someone tweets a resource or link that you want to go back to later, a fast way to keep track is to click the star next to the tweet. This is how you make a tweet a favorite. From your Twitter profile page, you can click on Favorites to see all those tweets.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. Does anyone else have suggestions for people new to Twitter chatting?

Hope to tweet with you tonight at 9 Eastern / 8 Central!