B2B Blogger’s Guide To Turning Tweets Into Rockstar Conference Coverage

So, you’re craving a surge of fresh, unique, valuable content on the front page of your business’s B2B blog…but scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel for blog post topics that aren’t blatantly self-promotional or boring as ever.

One solution is to attend a few industry conferences, conventions, trade shows, seminars, or networking events throughout the year and churn out rockstar blog coverage on behalf of your company.

Covering events in your B2B industry by way of live-tweets and blog posts is a surefire way to amplify your content and link building strategies, not to mention help establish your brand as an active, engaged, beloved contributor to your B2B community.

The influx of fresh, unique, valuable content, showcased on Twitter and your company blog will attract new eyeballs from interested readers / potential subscribers, customers, and evangelists. More social shares of content from your blog mean more positive social signals sent to the search engines, and impressive coverage can definitely garner inbound links from a variety of relevant sites.

Another great perk of covering industry event is you don’t have to be the thought-leader; you just have to be quick enough, deep enough, and caffeinated enough to rebroadcast the gems, jewels, and pearls of wisdom thought-leaders in your industry share straight from the podium.

Live bloggers in the front row @SMX

Live Tweeting

Live-tweeting is a terrific means to get the goods to the masses in real-time. Instant coverage is welcomed and appreciated by folks who can’t attend, and shows the community you’re a trusted and reliable source to follow during that (and future) events.

The crown jewels of conference coverage, however, are the comprehensive recaps you post to your B2B blog. Real(ish)-time blogging might seem more daunting than live-tweeting, but it doesn’t have to be– and you can provide both real-time tweet coverage to the community as well as follow up (same day) write-ups that serve as stand-alone, powerful resources and live on your company blog.

Follow this 7-step guide to turning live-tweet coverage into rockstar conference blog coverage and you’ll be well on your way. It provides maximum harmony between quality and efficiency so you can deliver amazing work without burning yourself out.

1.  Scrape Tweets

Step 1 is really “Live-tweet the heck out of a conference session,” but let’s assume you already did that.

• Go to your Twitter.com profile and with your cursor, highlight every tweet from that session.

Naturally, the initial bits of coverage will be towards the bottom of the page and the closing tweets will be towards the top. So…

• Scroll back as far as you have to to reach the first tweet of the session.
• Once you have every shred of live-tweet coverage highlighted, copy onto clipboard.

2.  Sanitize Formatting

• Paste into Notepad on a Windows machine, TextEdit on a Mac.
• Notepad automatically strips formatting from where you copied the content. If you’re working in TextEdit, click “Format” -> “Make Plain Text”.

This will remove things like your avatar, hyperlinks, and other messy nonessentials from the web.

3.  Remove The Junk

Sanitizing format won’t strip all messy nonessentials, such as timestamps, your Twitter handle, or hashtags. So…

• Copy your text from the notepad into a Word document and get ready to prune some more.
• Take a look at what’s there in abundance and should be hacked out.
• Do mass “find” (CTRL / Command F) for what you want to hack and “replace” with a single space bar. This will, in effect, remove those nonessentials.

Remember, we’re going for efficiency here. When you approach step 4 and start to turning the tweets into a blog post, you’ll want as little filler present as possible. Sanitizing format and removing the junk will leave you with the Grade A Top Choice meat of the tweets.

4.  Reverse The Timeline

Now you have a long list of tweets from your session, fat trimmed and ready for business. Only one problem: They’re in reverse-chronological order! To quickly flip the timeline of your tweets, head to Excel.

• Paste your tweets in Column B.
• In Column A, fill in the numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc – one number per cell.
• Select your three numbered cells and drag the corner down to the cell next to your last tweet. The numbers are what we will use to reverse the tweets.
• Highlight Column A, click the “Sort” button.

Et voilà! Column A should house a stream of numbers, largest to smallest, and Column B should house a stream of your tweets, from the start to the finish of the session. Next…

• Copy Column B, paste back in your notepad to remove formatting carried over from Excel.

5.  Dump In Backend Of Blog

• Paste tweets from notepad in the WYSIWYG of your blog.
• Make a fresh pot of coffee or pop open a can of Mountain Dew. Now onto the fun part.

6.  Connect The Dots

Just as infants don’t come out of the womb ready to discuss Einstein’s theory of relativity, live-tweets aren’t ready to thrive in the blogosphere without a little TLC.

Connect the dots between each individual tweet– each individual thought, tactic, tip, and takeaway– until you’re left with cohesive, sensical content. Make it flow. Add transitions, clarification, (perhaps even mild humor!) where appropriate. If you’re a strong live-tweeter and the speaker delivered a strong presentation, there really shouldn’t be too much work to do in this step.

7.  Polish Formatting

Make it look like a blog post.

• Add images, whether stock or photos from the show
• Link to speakers’ names or companies, if so desired
• Break up dense paragraphs with bullet points or numbered lists (like this one!)
• Add sub-headers to indicate new topics
• Bold important tips

Use blockquotes to hammer home significant takeaways, or as another way to spice up the aesthetic of the post.

Ah yes, there is one final step to this guide:

8.  Have Fun!

About The Author

Lauren Donovan

Lauren Donovan has worked in online marketing since 2006, specializing in event marketing, content management, organic and paid social media, community and reputation management, and real-time journalism. She currently serves as Director of Marketing at Third Door Media -- producer of the Search Marketing Expo and MarTech conference series and publishers of Search Engine Land and MarTech.