
Real-time marketing is here, and it has been here, to stay. There is huge opportunity for businesses and brands to interact with their audiences in real-time.
Businesses and brands, however, shouldn’t one day per year get a ‘real-time war room’ together and hope for some serendipitous opportunity to present itself, or worse, shoehorn their message into a less than memorable moment.

Setting goals and objectives to guide your social media marketing activity is critical to ensure that your efforts are making a meaningful and positive impact on your business.
Without well-defined goals and objectives, there is no way to determine what success looks like, no way to measure success, and no way to optimize. In short, without established goals and objectives, you’re completely flying blind.

No matter how much time you spend thinking about every conceivable scenario that might play out on social media, it is impossible to think of them all.
Opportunities arise, competitors emerge, trolls attack, sites go down, preferences change, and sometimes, pigs fly.
This is the nature of social media and the world in which we live and our businesses operate. Things change fast. Really fast.

It’s no secret that people are making more purchases, and purchase decisions, online. Consumer purchase behaviour is undergoing a dramatic shift that is getting more pronounced every day, and unprepared retailers are seeing declines as a result.
Over the course of the last week or so, there have been several revealing statistics released to support that consumers are not only spending more time shopping online, but that brick and mortar shopping behaviour is being influenced by digital interactions, which of course includes social media.

While you’re undoubtedly busy planning your personal social schedule with family and friends, now is also a perfect time to be planning your social media activity for the coming weeks. Planning can be critical to ensure you’ve got your ducks in a row for when you inevitably take a bit of time off to enjoy the season, and to sustain activity and engagement with your audience during this time.

By their nature, best practices tend to be generalizations. Typically, they don’t specifically address your unique situation, opportunities and challenges. And getting too caught up in following best practices can affect your comfort and willingness to take a chance and do something amazing that may be contrary to conventions.

The observation of Remembrance Day shouldn’t be seen as a social media opportunity. If you want to pay tribute to the soldiers that have served your country on your organization’s social media properties, it is my recommendation to do it tastefully, in a tone that is appropriate for the day, and keep it solely focused on honouring those deserving of being honoured.

The secret is out! Running promotions on social media can be an effective way to reward existing fans of your brand, further prove your brand’s promise, and attract new people to your brand.
To maximize the ROI of running a promotion, however, you’re going to want to promote your activity to boost awareness and attract a maximum number of relevant participants.