One of my colleagues (@chrisdesrochers) told me the smartest thing you can do at a conference is find the official hashtag and tweet the insights from each session you attend. Though I’ve attended a number of conferences, I was always an observer rather than a participant in the conversation – until I attended eTailWest where I decided to try to my hand at live tweeting to measure the impact.

Statistics
31 Tweets
24 Favorites
13 New Followers
11 Retweets
5 Replies

Actions per tweet (Favs+RTs+Replies) = 1.29

The benefits to sending out some of the sessions’ top insights was an increase in followers, engagement and even a curated blog post by Search Spring that featured some of my tweets. I was surprised at the level of interaction and in my opinion this provided more value than simply taking notes because you have to manually paraphrase a point or argument in 140 characters or less and by doing so you internalize the message.

To give you some context, most weeks I generally get 1-2 total interactions so this was definitely an eye opener to the power of contextual conversation and engagement and something I will do at all conferences going forward. A few things I would change would be better attribution (presenters should always have their Twitter handle in the deck footer) and more engagement with other people involved in the conversation.

Overall it was really interesting experience and now I want to attend a bunch of random conferences and tweet about them so I can keep up this awesome interaction fueled rush.