How to Plan an Awesome Twitter Chat

This post originally appeared on my personal blog. See it here.
This year I, along with another lovely lady, have been running the social media accounts for my grad program. I've learned so much about social media strategy, content creation and interacting with other users. It's also been really great experience for something I would love to do professionally. 
Last semester, we organized and moderated the program's first-ever Twitter chat. We got current students, alumni, and even a few professors involved, and everyone connected with one another. It went so well that we have another one planned for next month. 
Want to try your hand at it? Here are my tips for how to plan a killer Twitter chat that everyone will talk about for weeks!

First, take time to brainstorm some good questions. Aim for 10-12 ideas; that will give you plenty to choose from in the next step. You can always combine ideas to form one question. But remember to keep your chat focused on one main topic.
Pick 6-8 good questions, depending on the time frame for the chat. Don't try to do too much, though! Twitter chats can feel rushed if there are too many questions in the time frame. Most chats are planned for an hour. For us, one question every 10 minutes (6 questions) worked really well. It gave everyone enough time to tweet their responses and have some conversations with other participants.
Create a unique hashtag to label tweets from the chat. Search your hashtag before the chat, just to be sure it hasn't been used for other content. If nothing comes up when you search it, it's all yours!
Plan for a time when participation will be high. Night is a great time; people are finished eating dinner and usually settled in for the night. 8:00 and 9:00 are ideal start times. I find that Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays are great nights for participation. 
Promote, promote, promote! Get some buzz going to build up the excitement. Remind people about it so they'll be sure to tune in. 
Schedule your questions ahead of time so you aren't tweeting them while trying to interact with participants. I highly recommend doing this in an application like Tweetdeck, where you can manage multiple accounts and timelines. It's so helpful - the questions just appear and you can carry on as usual. Tweetdeck is my lifesaver. Don't have Tweetdeck? Download it here. Another great scheduling and post-timing app/plugin is Buffer. It lets you schedule to Twitter and Facebook, which is cool. 
Lastly, recap the chat for those who couldn't participate or follow along. Storify recaps work great. Be sure to share a link to the recap story on your social media accounts so everyone can see it. 
And that's it! It sounds like a lot, but it's so worth it in the end. Twitter chats are quickly becoming one of my favorite things to plan and run. 
Have you ever hosted a Twitter chat? What are your best tips for planning?