Building a Brand’s Real-Time Social Strategy
By: Errol Villasanta
Tags: Advertising, Social Media, Social Media Strategy

As a relatively new medium, social media is a world where platform features, public usage, and platform popularity change in an ever-revolving, neck-breaking pace. In order to adapt to this unstable environment, it is necessary for social managers to continuously update their social strategies every few weeks to ensure that they are optimizing their content’s potential on social.

One strategy though, that has remained relatively constant in this space, is real-time social content.

Why bother?

Developing a real time social strategy can greatly benefit your brand by:

Improving Brand Presence

Reaching a Greater Audience

Raising Page Engagement

Potential for Earned Media (PR/Buzz/Mentions )

Developing Brand Personality

Staying Relevant

So what should be your RTS (real-time strategy) plan of attack?:

Step 1: Understand your Audience

Regardless if you’re creating a plan for always-on content or RTS, a precursor to every social strategy should be a good foundation of data. Working with your analytics team, identify who’s engaging with your content to create a snapshot of your engaged social community. After identifying your most engaged audience, expand your research to further understand their social behavior, likes/dislikes, and lifestyle. This can help focus the range of trending topics and events that would feel authentic to the brand and in turn positively resonate with your audience.

Step 2: Create a Cultural Calendar

After identifying your engaged audience’s social behavior, map out key holidays and events relevant to your brand to form a cultural calendar. These dates can be broad (i.e Christmas, Mother’s Day, Fourth of July) to more brand specific (i.e National Gym Day). Get creative! The more unique your holiday is to your audience, the better.

Extra Points: When engaging with highly celebrated holidays, add paid promotion to your posts to give your content an extra push to stand out from the rest of the brands who are also trying to take advantage of the same holiday/topic.

Step 3: Be Proactive.

Plan social content around relevant moments.

Use your cultural calendar as a checklist of potential opportunities for your brand to pre-plan posts that are relevant to the holiday/topic. Doing so gives you more time to creatively ideate and better flesh out awesome social ideas that, when executing, still feels timely and relevant. Use this pre-planning stage to also ensure that your content’s legal and brand approvals are confirmed so you can ensure that your content is as timely and relevant as possible.

*Extra Points: For high profile events like the Super bowl, consider simultaneously having legal, creatives and strategy in one room during the event to quickly take advantage of any pop-up opportunities to integrate your brand into trending social conversation.

Step 4: Be Reactive and Flexible.

Stay alert and look for social opportunities.

As comprehensive as the cultural calendar is, not every trend, news story, and platform update can necessarily be planned for. Knowing this, use some time in the morning to do a sweep of trending topics, social conversations, news stories, and what brands are posting in your competitive set to ensure that you’re not missing any opportunity to post something related and timely. Afterwards, periodically check on trends throughout the day and stay attentive as missing out on inserting yourself in a blatantly related trending topic can have repercussions as well (i.e don’t end up like Red Lobster.)

Step 5: Be Authentic.

Remember to keep the “social” in social media.

One thing that I’ve seen brands forget to do on social, is the need to be “social”. When developing your RTS, remember that these social channels should not be an exact extension of your print/tv/traditional executions but instead an opportunity to integrate a more personal, consumer facing version of your campaign. A study done by Forbes in conjunction with Elite Daily echoes this need for an authentic voice by showing how Millennials value authenticity as more important than content, with roughly 43% of millennials ranking authenticity over content when consuming news. (link)

Step 6: Optimize

Develop learnings to help guide, focus, and improve your brand’s future real-time social strategy. During your reporting cycle, work with your analytics team to pull insights on how your real time content performed.

Questions to ask yourself include:

What audience did my RTS posts reach?

How did they perform against your brand’s always on content?

Did my target audience positively engage with the content?.

What worked/didn’t work?

Keep in mind that real time content won’t always yield amazing results. Regardless, these learnings are vital to understand how to better improve your later RTS strategies. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one writing an article on RTS strategies in the future.