Our very first conference BlueGlass LA is just taking place this week and we are all really excited about it. However if you couldn’t make it to the event (and surely are desperate about that), here are some great Twitter tips for you to still acquire knowledge and network with the participants:

Educate Yourself : Collect the Discussions

Besides being an essential networking tool, a conference is also an awesome way to exchange knowledge and information.

Twitter will help you find what people have been talking within and about the event. You can collect Tweets, summarize them, write reports on the event and what has been shared there.

However you do know that Twitter Search spans the last 30 days only, do you? So archiving Tweets around a really useful conference and sessions would be a great idea.

There are only a couple of tools that will also help you save the Tweeted information for further reference. You may want to try both of them:

1. The Archivist is a nice desktop application (Windows-only) that lets you run any search within Twitter database and lets you export the results to Excel. You can then use Excel columns to:

  • Search within the topical Tweets,
  • Grab the column listing all the Twitter users and create the list via Tweepl (to follow all of them with one click and let others follow them as well), etc
  • Filter and sort Tweets, etc, etc

The Archivist

The tool is very easy to use. Just get it installed, run the search and Save the file to further update it with latest Tweets.

The View menus allows you to view the chart of the search results history and the pie to visualize the Tweeting users:

The Archivist

2. TwapperKeeper is rather a handy tool that allows to create the permanent archive of all Tweets around a (conference) hashtag. With help of this tool, you can thus create a one-reference source of knowledge exchange around any event.

To create an event, first login with your Twitter account (using Twitter authentication) and then simply provide the hashtag, description and tags:

TwapperKeeper

As soon as you create the archive, the tool will send a public Tweet using its official Twitter account linking to your new archive:

Twitter after the conference

Here’s our conference Twitter archive by the way.

As you can see, the archive can be sorted by date, filtered by user or a keyword and set to exclude all the Retweets. No matter which sorting and filtering options you choose, you will be able to get the direct URL of the new archive to link to. For example, here’s our archive excluding all the RTs.

You can also export your archive to save it locally and analyze the collection.

Network: Connect to the Conference Participants

Visiting industry conferences is by far the most effective way to build valuable connections with partners and clients. However if you couldn’t make it to the event, it doesn’t have to mean you can’t get connected to people who were there.

BlastFollow is a handy tool that lets you create the list of all Twitter users who use the official conference hashtag and follow them all with one click. While the tool may be potentially dangerous in the wrong hands, it works like a charm as the “remote” conference networking tool.

To use BlastFollow, simply enter a favorite hashtag (in our case that’s #blueglassla) and click the “Get Users!” button. After a few seconds, you will see the number of users who tweeted with that hashtag recently.

Important note: the tool doesn’t use the Twitter auth to access your account. You will need to provide your login data, so use for your own discretion!

BlastFollow

Let’s get the most out of the SEO conferences even though we can’t make it to all of them!