Top Takeaways from an Action Packed Inbound Marketing Webinar

HubSpot and Hootsuite teamed up once again in attempt to break the record for the world’s largest webinar. The goal of 11,000 live participants was set in order to break the record. Webinar attendees were strongly encouraged to tweet about the webinar using the hashtag #InboundSci and provide a link to the webinar.

There was major incentive for tweeting as well. 50 participants receive a free ticket to Inbound 2012. 50 participants get The Collaborative Organization by Jacob Morgan, 50 more get Dan Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, and all attendees get up to a 50% discount to the Inbound conference. At the end of the webinar, @danzarrella tweeted that there were more than 20,000 tweets sent about the webinar.

Dan Zarrella provided massive amounts of impactful information and data about social media and everything inbound marketing. (He was also talking a mile a minute.) Sadly, the webinar was not recorded, but don’t worry! It will be presented again at HubSpot’s Inbound 2012 in August in Boston, MA. If you want the useful information now, search #InboundSci on Twitter, a trending topic, and you’ll find basically everything Dan said during the webinar.

Here are some of the top takeaways I had from the webinar.

• 70% of business people still prefer reading print books over eBooks.
• Highly followed Twitter accounts tend to be less conversational.
• 60-80% of tweets should contain links so they will be retweeted. Keep your replies at or less than 10%.
• Give your audience something worth retweeting. Most tweets sent between 4-5pm get retweeted.
• Create interesting content and share on social media to get more links. 
• 70% of people are affected by blogs when making purchases.
• 50% of people say they judge how trustworthy your website is based on your SEO. 
• There is no real benefit to having comments on your blogs, from a marketing perspective.
• First name personalization tends to have higher click-through-rates with emails.
• Emails sent around 6am get the most reads and CTRs. Email sending frequency doesn’t really affect the CTR.
• Offer people something of value when thinking of lead generation. Remember: everyone loves FREE stuff.
• Bigger forms mean high quality leads. However, less fields lead to better conversions.

The webinar has been over for a while now but the topic is still buzzing, especially on Twitter. I don’t think I’ve fully recovered from that action and information packed interactive webinar. I sent out approximately 120 tweets during the hour-long webinar!

Did you attend the live webinar? What takeaways do you have?