WOMMA Summit has come and gone, but the insights have just begun.

Thanks to our friends at Social@Ogilvy, we have put together an all-inclusive WOMMA Summit Twitter infographic detailing the action and conversation that surrounded the marketing conference of the year.

As you can see, #WOMMASummit2012 generated a Twitter reach of over 59 million impressions, which consisted of more than 7,000 individual tweets. Considering this was only a three-day event, the extension of the conversation went far beyond our expectations.

But the big numbers are not the only insights WOMMA and Social@Ogilvy discovered. Below are our four WOMMA Summit takeaways.

1. Large followings does not always equal a lot of engagement

Looking at the top five retweets, it is obvious that the Ronald McDonald shoe garnered the most impressions, as it never hurts to have over 798,000 Twitter followers. However, interestingly enough, even though it was an image, that tweet did not accumulate the most retweets.

Gemma Craven, new WOMMA Board Member, and EVP, Head of Social@Ogilvy New York with a following of 2,684, generated 34 retweets by sharing “Social media needs to be a part of how companies do business today – yes, this is about change management @jbell99 #WOMMASummit.”

Gemma was live tweeting during a session led by John Bell, Global Managing Director at Social@Ogilvy, and his reach may have helped engagement. However, many of her close connections and links were those who shared and passed this on. The true power of relationship-building with your followers cannot be ignored. Far too often, brands and agencies alike want to concentrate on the raw numbers, such as followers, but when you take the step further, to really connect with your audience, long-term engagement begins to hold.

2. Don’t be afraid of one-way conversations during live events (Yes, we just said that.)

Offline events lend themselves to content creation with less user-to-user conversation (@Reply).

When people are eagerly listening to presentations, tweeting, Instagramming, and taking notes, there leaves little room for conversation-type engagement. Therefore, attendees like to see small nuggets of information they can quickly identify with and retweet; hence, the 10% @Reply rate on all tweets during Summit. We have seen a similar trend after writing about the #iHeartRadio Music Festival, which received an 8% @Reply rate.

Judging by three of our top five retweets, Gemma, WOMMA, and the MSLGROUP N. America all generated many retweets by quoting basic principles heard at WOMMA Summit. There were no links attached to the tweets, and there were no images (which many people say drive engagement). Retweets were driven solely by the connection to the content.

People were encouraged enough to take action because each tweet was short, simple, to the point, and could easily be understood without attending. There is no point linking to a tweet when no one is going to read the story. No one has time. According to Panorama, tweets with links are retweeted 86% more than tweets without links. With that being said, according to HubSpot, 15% of retweets aren’t even clicked.

The rule of thumb should be to give people a small amount of content to share. According to Buddy Media’s Effective Tweeting Report, the most effective tweets are those that “use less than 100 characters per tweet.” It’s like the old saying, “a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”

The next time you are pondering over your social strategy for offline events, keep in mind the behavior of the end users. They are looking for short blurts of knowledge that they can connect to and, most importantly, provide value to their Twitter handle. A question to ask yourself before hitting the “tweet” button is, “will this tweet help make my followers look smarter?” Ultimately, people are retweeting you because you found (or created) the content first.

3. Leverage your brand assets – Brands that use their existing brand identity to connect with the audience can have a resounding effect

Now, let’s look at the other two top retweets from McDonald’s and the Wynn Las Vegas. These tweets actually had the greatest reach, but it’s worth noting that while the size of the following affects reach, it doesn’t always affect engagement.

McDonald’s has over 798,000 Twitter followers and the Wynn Las Vegas has over 464,000 Twitter followers. We can assume almost all of their followers, or at least a large majority of them, have little interest in word of mouth marketing. Nonetheless, that does not mean they don’t have a captive audience which is waiting to interact with content that is true to the brand’s core message.

Before #WOMMASummit 2012, WOMMA was hosting a photo contest to help generate some pre-conference chatter. The goal was to show off some brand swag, social proof that #WOMMASummit, McDonald’s, and contest winner BlogFrog did not disappoint.

McDonald’s leveraged one of the brand’s greatest historical assets – Ronald McDonald. After all, who doesn’t love Ronald McDonald? We predict, as brands become more social-media savvy and transparent, they will open up their archives and share content that is not just aligned to their current marketing messaging, but aligned to the true principles that sparked the success of the brand from the very start.

The best part about this type of marketing strategy is that it’s very real. We have implemented a similar social strategy with Ogilvy & Mather by sharing David Ogilvy quotes, memos, letters, and speeches; some of which have never before been seen by the public. We aren’t doing this for the sake of marketing. We are doing this because internally, we love David Ogilvy and that just shines through in our messaging.

Let’s focus on the next tweet with the second largest reach coming from the Wynn; “#WOMMASummit rooms are all ready, we apologize for the delay. Please return to the Registration Desk for your room keys. Thank you.”

Why was this message successful? On the surface, it counters some of what we previous stated. At first glance, it doesn’t provide any thought leadership or offer “smart value.” However look again. This is actually a great tweet. Once again, it’s aligned to their brand. Their brand provides a service. The better your stay is from the very beginning of the trip (from booking to checking-in) to the very end (from checking-out to unpacking at home) is what truly matters to the magnificent hotel. The Wynn didn’t wait for people to check-in; they beat the traveler to it by reaching out to them first and letting them know the status of the situation.

4. Simple and quick advice for brands – Use hash tags

Each brand used the #WOMMASummit hash tag to either introduce their followers to the event (upon which they can observe the hash tag after) or to engage them in the moment. One of the first questions brands should have when discussing how to socialize their offline event is, “what should our hash tag be?” As an FYI, keep it short and to the point. People from the outside should be able to understand what the hash tag is about. Don’t expect people will investigate something that they have no idea about.

According to Buddy Media’s study, “use hash tags, but don’t overdo it. Tweets with hash tags receive two times more engagement than those without hash tags. But going overboard has a negative impact. Tweets with one or two hash tags receive 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hash tags. Using more than two hash tags actually leads to a 17% drop in engagement.”

Those are our takeaways from our WOMMA Summit infographics. What do you think? What did you gather from this post? We want to hear from you.

This article was written by Jacob Hurwith, Marketing & Social Media Coordinator, WOMMA, and Adam Kornblum, Social Business Producer, Social@Ogilvy, and first appeared on WOMMA’s All Things WOMM blog.