Last night I went along to Social Media London’s May event, which was focused on how brands can make the most of ‘real-time’ Twitter marketing and personalise their social channels to boost engagement. The speaker was Javier Burón of SocialBro, a Twitter management and analytics tool.

Here are my key takeaways from Javier’s presentation, which you can view in full here.

• Consumers spend 58% of their time on digital media, yet many brands are still not allocating the appropriate level of budget to support their digital marketing efforts
• Twitter lends itself to real-time marketing more than any other social media platform (just look at how Oreo leveraged this back in 2013 with their now almost legendary Superbowl power cut ad) therefore your strategy needs to be a combination of planned and unplanned activity – make sure you build time into your schedule to be reactive
• The five most important things to remember when it comes to real-time marketing are:

1.  Don’t be boring
2. Avoid sales pitches
3.  Ensure you have an easy sign-off process which enables you to be responsive
4. Plan for success – what happens if your brand’s tweet does go viral?
5. Avoid controversial topics – this usually backfires

• The key to real-time marketing (and indeed, all marketing) is to understand your audience in order to better connect with them – for example, what do they enjoy? What do they find funny? What type of brands do they already engage with on social media?
• Twitter is a person-to-person platform, therefore it’s important to be human – if you’re auto-responding to tweets and follows, stop doing it and genuinely talk to people who interact with you instead
• Research has suggested that 65% of UK consumers prefer to contact a brand via social media than a customer service line, therefore consider whether your brand needs a separate, dedicated customer service account
• Engage in ‘active listening’ on Twitter – for example, create lists of certain types followers and keep an eye on what they’re talking about
• Empower your social media team to be able to respond to people right away – set clear tone of voice guidelines for your team to follow when answering @replies
• Signing customer service tweets with initials is a great way to add a personal, human touch – plus it allows customers to keep track of who they’ve had conversations with
• Create lists of influential followers and brand advocates, then use your Twitter account to re-market to them directly
• SocialBro has found that use of capital letters (where appropriate of course, YOU DON’T WANT TO SHOUT AT EVERYONE) and parentheses tend to increase engagement with tweets
• Use images wherever humanly possible – since Twitter’s update at the end of 2013 which placed ‘in-line’ images in users’ feeds, engagement levels on tweets with images (pic.twitter.com URLs only) vastly outperform those without

Thank you to Social Media London for putting on a great event and thanks to Javier from SocialBro for sharing these helpful tips and insights!