Conferences serve many functions, two of which are networking and gaining knowledge. I’ve only been to two conferences, so I am by no means an expert, but here’s one thing that annoys me:
When someone attending a conference tweets crap.
If you are live-tweeting an event, you need to be offering up SPECIFIC tips and tricks coming from the speakers, for the edification and collective knowledge of the community. SEO is a tight community, so I would even say it is your duty to be helpful to others by sharing the knowledge you are receiving!
Allow me to give 5 actionable rules for live-tweeting SEO conferences, with examples:
1. Provide ACTIONABLE tips.
People not at the conference want information that they can immediately put to work on their site.
Here is an actionable tip:
2. Tweet the whole talk, or not at all.
There are not many things that are more harmful than out-of-context statements. Do us all a favor and tweet things in context.
This statement:
is much different when put in the context of:
3. Provide a link (if possible) to speaker slidedecks and other interesting resources they mention.
This can also help start building rapport with the brand, so mention them by Twitter handle.
This is good:
4. Add your own thoughts to some tweets.
Also, don’t be afraid to be a little snarky. Snark = entertaining.
Like this:
5. Retweet others at the conference and admit your mistakes when you screw up.
We all hear things wrong. For this reason, be ready and willing to admit your mistakes.
A few more reasons to live-tweet helpful tips
If you need them, here are some more reasons to live-tweet helpful bits from conferences:
1. New followers. I started interacting with a ton of UK and Europe SEOs because of my live tweets from Distilled’s #linklove in London back in March.
2. Links to your site. You’re building rapport and helping others out. I’ve gotten SEOmoz, Distilled, and many other links because of my live tweeting, and I wasn’t even looking for them!
3. If you are tweeting live, you can go back through and read your tweets like notes! This is how I wrote a lot of my London #linklove recap.
In the spirit of providing helpful tips, here is a good example I have seen that you maybe should try to imitate:
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