We all need to engage in professional development from time to time. Being with my social media peers always has a refreshing, invigorating and inspirational effect on me. If you’re going to take time away from your busy work schedule, and financial resources from other business building activities, you need to recoup what you’ve spent in other ways. There is a plethora of ways to turn a conference into great social media content. Here are just some of the ideas I came up with at my most recent professional development opportunity.
1. Write a Top 10 list of things you learned
Here’s my Top 10 Takeaways from Social Media Marketing World.
2. Do a recap of each session you attended.
I’m still working on this one. I did write one recap of the Instagram Expert’s Top Instagram Tips so far.
3. Create a storify of the best tweets from the event hashtag. I didn’t do one for #SMMW15, but many others did. Here’s one I like from Hootsuite. I tried to embed it here for you to see, but it takes up too much space. So go have a look, then come back…it’s ok…I’ll wait.
5. Keep a list of blog ideas on paper during the conference and then write them.
My list from the conference included this blog you’re reading now, the recaps, Ideas for Periscope, and many others I may never get to. I’d rather have too many to choose from than struggle to think of something.
6. Do a complete conference recap with photos of the event, graphics, links to your favourites, etc. I didn’t do this at the time and I wish I had…now the memories of what some of the pictures represent are faded.
7. Record videos, if you’re allowed, and embed them on your blog and social media. Even better, can you Periscope something from the conference and embed that later. Periscope wasn’t on Android while I was at the conference, so Instagram video was the best I had.
I managed to record two Instagram videos. One from Guy Kawasaki by Twirp Communications, giving a shout out to my friend Adam Purcell, @CaringCounts, and another from CS Penn with a shout out to the Halifax PodCamp founders. For me, it was a great excuse to talk to these two social media celebrities without asking for something for myself.
A video posted by Anita Kirkbride (@twirpcommunications) on
8. Turn some of these blogs into SlideShares and post on LinkedIn (coming soon).
9. Write a post about all the new tools and resources you learned about. I’ve been writing about Instagram and Periscope and some of the tools to work with those.
10. Create one master blog post that lists all of your posts to do with the conference.
AHEM. See what I did there?
Of course, you should also be taking pictures and sharing them on your social networks. Not only is it fun, but your clients like to see that you’re participating in professional development. It builds trust! What other ideas do you have for turning a professional development opportunity into social media content?
I had to show my husband that I’m not the only one who uses the word ‘plethora’. haha Great post!
And I’ll bet he doesn’t like myriad either?