Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Real-time social media marketing can be a powerful way to engage with your brand’s followers by tapping into current events or trending topics. In this post, we’ll look at ways to stay relevant through real-time marketing, and how search and social data can work together to boost results.

Real-time marketing with Twitter

While the World Cup is long over, real-time marketing lessons from the sporting event live on. Twitter emerged as the clear winner in its social media battle with Facebook for dominance in World Cup coverage, announcing that there were 672 million tweets related to #WorldCup, setting an all-time Twitter record for an event. Of all the brands vying for real-time Twitter engagement, Adidas emerged as the most successful “with over 1.6 million tweets, retweets and replies mentioning the brand” – but not without months on end of careful preparation and planning for each and every possible scenario, according to this report by AdAge. You don’t have to be an Adidas-sized brand to leverage Twitter for real-time marketing, or depend on an event as globally anticipated as the 2014 World Cup. However, you do need a real-time marketing strategy that incorporates your brand’s message, and the right tools to execute it successfully.

Check out this post from Twitter on how to use its tools to engage in real-time marketing around events, as well as several case studies showing how others succeeded with their campaigns to help you get started with yours. And keep in mind the other tactics you can use to be a part of the conversation in real time. Besides events-driven Twitter conversations, there are also spontaneous discussions around news. Referred to as “news-jacking,” brands have been known to use current events to be a part of the discussion on Twitter. However, the principle remains the same: a well thought-out brand message that informs and engages, as opposed to a sales blast. Check out these fails for what not to do.

Twitter trending for SEO

An informed social media strategy that incorporates SEO can also drive organic search results. In collaboration with Twitter, BrightEdge developed an innovative tool, “Twitter Trending,” within its S3 platform that allows brands to leverage Twitter for effective real-time marketing and SEO. By tracking topics that are trending on Twitter aligned with your brand’s Web content, you can drive traffic to your site by tweeting that content relevant to those conversations. As this BrightEdge case study of Tiny Prints shows, the online boutique realized a 47 percent increase in organic search rankings on long-tail keywords and URLs that were trending on Twitter by utilizing search and social data together.

This post on Twitter about Tiny Prints’ success highlights the ROI: “Follower engagement on pages and keywords grew 300 percent over a month long campaign that aligned Tweets with digital content.” More data from the case study show how search and social worked together to create great results:

Visibility across search and social — Tiny Prints used BrightEdge Twitter Trending to measure and track the influence of social engagement on organic search rankings. They were able to easily track page and keyword level social sharing on Twitter and correlate these against search ranking of the same pages. Actionable Opportunities — With visibility across social and search, Tiny Prints was able to identify keywords and URL opportunities where rich social engagement and exposure could influence organic search performance. Armed with this data Tiny Prints created compelling tweet content that engaged followers who subsequently retweeted them.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu details how Twitter Trending SEO technology (which he refers to as an “SEO-Social super group”) works in this article for Search Engine Land.

An integrated SEO-social strategy: Adobe case study

Beyond Twitter Trending, BrightEdge’s S3 platform informs brands on how social media as a whole drives search results. As Susan Kuchinskas reports for ClickZ, while speaking at the BrightEdge Share 12 conference, Adobe Systems senior manager of global search marketing, David Lloyd, said the following:

Adobe uses the BrightEdge search optimization platform to understand how social media drives organic search results. For example, the platform allowed Adobe to see that seven tweets improved Adobe's rank on the keyword phrase "social analytics" from twenty-eighth to second in one case. In another case, the organic search rank went from fourth to second after 28 tweets and six Facebook actions.

Describing how Adobe achieves its SEO-Social synergy, David said that its content optimization efforts go beyond keyword, URL and link analysis, as the SEO team “organizes its content into ‘product stories,’” which then become a “messaging kit for editorial staff” so “the people doing the writing have search data to back up their stories.” From the report:

Keywords and URLs are shared with the social media team, so that they can optimize blogs, video and help pages, among other content. Social teams link back to the highest-converting target pages on Adobe.com where revenue can be captured. This strategy creates a virtuous circle in which search keywords inform some social media content. Those social conversations drive search equity and help the team make enhancements. These enhancements then improve social ranking, while social conversations inform the keyword strategy.

Leveraging search and social data plus the power of real time in Twitter is a win-win for multiple channels and your brand’s marketing strategy. If you’re not yet combining channels and tactics like organic search and social, start thinking about how you’ll incorporate your multichannel campaigns in 2015 using the data that’s available to you.