What advice would you give to SME’s considering engaging in real-time social media marketing?

Question asked by @3tcMerseyside

Real-time marketing, brilliant topic, really good way of getting huge visibility if done right, very quickly as well. First thing I will say is you can have a lot of fun with this and get lots visibility, but if you’re not careful it’s the type visibility that’s not really of interest to you because you could spend all day looking at the hashtags trending worldwide on Twitter, engaging with that and actually who’s looking at it, not your audience. So the first thing is you need to be very clear on the type of real-time marketing that will add value to your business. So have a look at your calendar for the next 12 months, what industry events are coming up, is there anything really interesting, really intriguing that you can plan for, you could do lots of planning, lots of research and lots of work leading up to so when it happens you can be ready, first to react and get the visibility you deserve. The other thing is if you’ve got branded assets ready to go, so it might be small memes which of branded with your ident or infographic templates or whatever that give you those marginal gains to react quicker when something does happen that’s relevant in your industry or sector. If you can do that than you’ve already gotten advantage on your competition.

Now you might also choose to try and start a hashtag or something, a campaign but it’s a lot harder, if you’re going to do that I’d recommend getting a group, a community that you’re already engaged with prewarned and ready to help you get lift-off in that respect.

Okay, so just to recap if you go to do real-time marketing make sure it’s relevant, be as prepared as possible, but the final thing I’ll leave you with is, humour works really well with real-time marketing, sometimes it’s difficult to get humour into dry subject so you’ve got the pick the battles that you think you can win but that’s the type of thing, highly emotive content, that’s the type of thing that gets the viral effect so do your planning, make sure it’s relevant, be ready and go 100% in to produce the best content you can as fast as you can and good luck with that.