Twitter Conversations

I am so happy that I was a part of the #edtechchat conversation on Twitter last night.   I have always read the conversations after they happen but was never apart of the opportunity in real-time.  This week was different. 

I had a chance to introduce myself and start to connect with other educators.  I had a chance to read the questions posted and post my thoughts and have people reply to them.  I had a chance to reply to others thoughts and start those conversations.  Among all of the great ideas going on I had a chance to retweet all of the ideas I did not want to loose! 

The conversation went fast but that was, in my opinion, a part of the experience.  You had to be continually looking for new information and always ready to reply.  I know that I missed a lot of information, but between retweets and reading the archives, we have the opportunity to catch up! 

Looking back I feel that my next step would be to engage in more on-depth conversations.  Looking back, many of my replies were comments such as "this is great" or "I would love to try."  These foster a good start in becoming comfortable in speaking with these other professionals, but do not foster further conversation.  For the next twitter conversation my goal is to seek out more information in my replies. 

How do you use Twitter and scheduled Twitter conversations to help develop professionally? How do you foster deeper conversations?