Tips for Real-time marketing with social media

One of the biggest marketing opportunities in the modern world comes in the form of popular events. Think the Oscars, the Olympics and the Super Bowl, all televised events that draw huge ratings. For example, an average of 114.4 million Americans tuned in the 2015 Super Bowl. In fact most high-profile events generate the opportunity for brands to get noticed and raise their own profile. In addition to the TV coverage there is the knock on impact of social media to consider. According to Twitter there were 36 million tweets related to the Super Bowl, and they received more than 2.5 billion impressions. Facebook also reported 265 million posts, comments and likes related to the huge event.

With such huge audiences involved it is no surprise that these events throw up some of the biggest and best opportunities for real-time or moment marketing, and brands and businesses across the globe race to get in on the buzz whilst it is happening. Obviously this means making the effort to be following them closely and having your creative head on to maximise on any moment that you can.

Many of the social media conversations surrounding these events go viral, taking advantage of our natural curiosity and desire for gossip. Whether it is the half time show, a celebrity tripping over the hem of their gown or other newsworthy reveal, it gives us something to connect with others about. Even the simplest and subtlest things can make big waves in the social media pond as we search for things to expand on, and in many cases blow completely out of proportion.

By being ready to react when watching these big ticket events, you too can position your brand at the starting blocks of the next big conversation.

Getting Ready

Speed really is the name of the game when it comes to reacting to events. Shorter attention spans and more content than ever being available means that the spike of interest you have to make an impression is limited. The biggest weapon in your arsenal is your smartphone. Pre-loaded with Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, Meme Generator and more helps you to get your posts created quickly. However, speed isn’t everything and you need to remember that you need to get traction for your content in order for it to count.

This is the occasion where bigger really is better, and the bigger your audience the greater the competitive edge you will have when you are battling for a piece of the spotlight. A bigger audience means more engagement, more retweets and an even bigger audience… and so on.

So what can you do to make your business stand out from the rest?

Be Quick

One of the best examples we have seen of a quickly devised marketing tweet has to come from Oreo. Their famous You can still dunk in the dark tweet, made famous during the Super Bowl blackout in 2013, took less than 34 minutes from concept to publishing and earned more than 15,000 retweets.

Stay aligned with your brand

There have been a number of horrendous occasions where companies or organisations have tried to immerse themselves in a conversation that really hasn’t had anything to do with their brand or values.

Similarly, take the example of the costume shark character who upstaged Katy Perry during her half time performance at the Super Bowl sufficiently enough to earn 284,000 tweets per minute about it. PETA chose to jump on this bandwagon and created a tweet of their own with the tagline PROOF u DON’T need real animals to amaze a crowd. Whilst the tweet got quite a lot of engagement, it also turned off some people who weren’t part of PETA’s audience.

Be Funny

Humour is one sure way of getting yourself noticed, and great humour can win you love and earn you a following. It is also a great way of inserting your brand or organisation into a conversation without coming across as pushy or overbearing.

A fantastic example we have seen is when Arby’s, famous for their burgers, took advantage of the shape of singer/rapper Pharrell’s hat he wore at the Grammy’s… because it was identical in shape to the Arby’s logo. Their tweet,Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back hashtagged #Grammys generated a whole heap of retweets purely because it was funny.

Humour also gets brands interacting with one another as proven when Quaker joined the conversation with a similarly humorous tweet. As long as you’ve got your website linked to your profile and your bio describes what you’re about then there is no need to do any pushy selling. Humour is also ultra-shareable on social media meaning you can get maximum exposure for quite minimal input.

Get Live

Live tweeting, streaming and posting under your brand name is one of the best ways of interacting with people who may be interested in your product or service. Best of all it is effective regardless of the scale of the event, although being able to live tweet about an event in your niche will put you within reach of people who will be much more relevant to your brand.

Hashtag usage is another powerful tool that can be used in conjunction with live tweeting as they extend your reach, give your audience something to follow along with and make your conversations easy to find. Twitter polls allow you to enhance this even further by letting you get feedback from others who are following the hashtags and engage with them in a more productive and interactive way.

If you want to get really clever, consider using Hootsuite for live tweeting, which allows you monitor multiple hashtags or profiles on different channels, but all on one easy to navigate dashboard. This will increase your capacity to engage with more conversations in real-time than your average social media user.

Be Prepared

Just like a boy scout, it pays to be prepared for big-noise events such as award ceremonies and big sporting events. Most of these opportunities are on the calendar well in advance and if there are clever marketing images or catchy slogans that you think you can create beforehand then it could be well worth the time and effort.

Make sure you keep the evening clear to watch and monitor trending social media, being in the right place at the right time could be a real time marketing goldmine!oH