Occasionally you may want to get involved in a Twitter 'chat'. These
are a great way to participate with a group discussion but doing so can also swamp your followers with irrelevant tweets.

How can this be avoided?

Ok, let's start from the beginning. A typical chat happens at a conference, For example, I recently attended the "Future of Web Apps" in London (which was fantastic by the way!). If you tweeted with the designated hashtag of #FOWA then your tweet would be visible to anyone searching on #FOWA. This is a great way to 'tune' into the background noise of what the audience think about presentations etc, it really adds another dimension (some people refer to this as the "back channel") .

However, it does have a problem. You can end up swamping many of your usual followers (many of whom may not be interested in the event). And we obviously don't want to annoy our followers too much as this is a sure fire way to get unfollowed!

The answer I have found is to 'hide' such chat tweets from my regular followers. 

How do I do this? 

I start each chat tweet with "@null" - this is is a reply (or "mention" as it's now called) to a non-existant account. This account cannot be "followed". Therefore my followers won't see @null tweets but such tweets will show up in a hashtag search and be visible where they are needed - simple eh? 

Note: the only problem here is that there is a chance that someone could breath life back into the @null account - we'd just have to find a new "null" account - infact I'll create one and add it as a comment later.