The most shared story around RSAC this year wasn’t an article in TechCrunch or Wired or Dark Reading. It wasn’t anything written by a reporter.
It was the FBI’s agenda for the show — sessions led by its spokespeople and what was happening at its booth. It had 493 interactions across social platforms, according to NewsWhip Spike, and beat out a series of posts from Cisco, which garnered 340 interactions.
While you might not be the FBI or Cisco, the conference preview post is one of three content staples for raising your visibility at a show. Here’s how to approach each of the three for the biggest impact.
1. The pre-show agenda/show preview.
This content can take many forms. At its most basic, it’s all about you: where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing at the show, including your booth, speakers, events, and more. Cloudflare’s Black Hat preview ranks well in search results around the conference, getting in front of attendees searching for information.
A more ambitious route is to produce an entire guide to the show, including insider tips, workshops and sessions attendees don’t want to miss, trends you expect, and so on. UpGuard gathered answers to common questions about Black Hat and tips like “avoid getting hacked,” in addition to its conference whereabouts.
The goal is to create an asset you can send to prospects, customers, partners, or whoever it is you want to connect with at the show. Visibility in search, distribution through email and social, and one-to-one outreach can earn you a slot on your audiences’ conference schedule.
2. Live updates.
Take selfies. Share ideas. Remind people when and where your experts are speaking or about events at your booth. Share the main takeaway from the sessions your researchers present. In short, take over the airwaves of the show with interesting, valuable, and fun content.
Post from your company account, sure, but encourage all your individual team members who are presenting or attending sessions to post from their own accounts for added visibility.
Be thoughtful about timing your posts too. If you’re promoting a session or booth event, post about it when attendees are most likely to be checking social and looking for what to do next — as sessions end, during networking breaks, etc. Brian Vecci of Varonis did exactly that leading up to his RSAC presentation.
Conferences can be time-consuming and all-engrossing, so it’s important to have a plan ahead of time, and ideally a team at home or at your booth coordinating efforts and supporting everyone on the ground at the show.
3. The recap.
Write up your own report of the show. It might include takeaways from your experts, a broader recap of standout sessions, trends, and conversations, or even the overall vibe. Just make it valuable, unique, and true. Trend Micro published a good example after RSAC.
You (hopefully) just had countless conversations with customers and prospects and know what thoughts and questions are on their minds. Angle your content to those topics. That way, you have a follow-up for everyone you connected with and an asset likely to resonate with others who didn’t attend the show. This fodder can fill your content calendar with engaging material for months beyond the show.
The faster you can post, the better. Coming out of conferences, people are exhausted, maybe a little sick, but also buzzing with ideas, and a timely recap post can tap into that energy and start a conversation. Often we’ll schedule a quick phone call with a client to get their take while they’re still at the conference, then write up a post for their review to expedite the process.
Conference content, done right, gives you more opportunities to get in front of the audiences you’re looking to attract. While you can’t control reporters’ schedules or what they choose to cover, you can control how your company covers the show and claim your share of the conversation.