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For years, Twitter has been transforming the ways in which we share and curate information. It has replaced the water cooler when it comes to TV chatter – creating a platform for real-time conversations about shows as they air – and it has emerged as the go-to source of information during live events and breaking news stories.

In fact, with 1 billion tweets published globally every two days, it’s no wonder that back in 2011 news of the DC earthquake traveled faster on Twitter than the natural disaster itself. This very combination of speed and relevancy that has made Twitter a useful tool for everyday citizens has also made it a powerful mechanism for marketers to reach highly engaged audiences when they’re most apt to interact.

Recent updates from the platform are empowering brands with even more opportunities to connect with the right people at the right times. Last week, Jackie Lamping, Head of Global Brand Advocacy at Twitter, stopped by our offices to share some of the platform’s best practices for brands.

During the presentation, Lamping noted that positive brand experiences often outshine negative ones on the platform. For example, when the UK-based mobile firm O2 experienced a 48-hour power outage earlier this year, the brand was faced with a wave of (understandably) frustrated customers. Yet O2’s community team kept its calm, retaining the brand voice while swiftly engaging with peoplein a helpful way. The result: A potential PR blunder was turned into a net positive for the brand.

The following are some of Twitter’s #BestPractices for brands – tips directly from the horse’s mouth that will help brands create more positive experiences like the example referenced above.

While Twitter is a real-time conversation platform – which of course requires spontaneous engagement – having a structured seasonal calendar in place will help marketers establish a consistent content series over time which aligns with their brand’s mission or audience.

For example, clothing retailers might want to focus extended campaign efforts during the holidays and Back to School time given the 48 percent YoY growth of social mentions of clothing during those seasons (source: Twitter).  Moreover, if you’re a brand like ZzzzQuil and trying to capitalize on sleeplessness, you might opt to backload tweets to the evening hours to better align with your target’s mindset. Beyond consumer behavior, brands should make sure that the content buckets fall in line with their tone of voice. Focus on what your consumers are saying and when they are talking to create a tailored campaign.

Lamping also recommends using Twitter for connecting cross-platform conversations. Target, for example, recently pulled this off with a commercial during the 2013 GRAMMYs that promoted Justin Timberlake’s new album release. By extending their :30 second spot to Twitter, Target gave fans the chance to access the album early and directly connected with fans as the commercial aired.

KFC had a similar approach for its #IAteTheBones campaign. The brand ran the hashtag whenever someone uttered the phrase in the on-air commercial and supported it across Twitter with paid media – and the effort didn’t end there. When KFC noticed the hashtag was taking off and that consumers were creating their own versions of the commercials on Vine and other video platforms, they leveraged the UGC with a contest celebrating the consumers’ content, thereby extending the life of the activation.

Organic conversations are important to any brand on Twitter, but a paid media strategy is integral to amplifying those conversations to attain broader reach. For marketers that are just diving into social advertising opportunities on Twitter, Lamping suggests Search Term or Hashtag Targeting, which will allow them to own brand terms on the platform and focus specifically on extending the reach of conversations that people might already be having about a brand. If you work for a QSR, focus on your key search terms, e.g. soda, menu items, key commercial content, frequently used hashtags and previously used brand marketing terms. Have a spokesperson or celebrity endorser? Buy against them, too. Leverage common phrases associated with your brand.

Twitter also recommends supporting campaigns, events and on-air commercials with TV Ad Targeting and Interest Targeting. Extending the message from on-air to mobile platforms allows fans to further connect with the commercial experience. This also allows brands to extend their messaging beyond the :30 clip and drive engagement.

Where can you brand go next on the platform? Twitter challenges agencies and marketers to help them explore new and untapped territories. For example, brands are constantly looking for ways to help their customers earn and spend social currency, so it’s only fitting that one South African-based beverage company created a vending machine that allowed consumers to pay via a tweet.

To help your brand think beyond 140 characters, Lamping urges marketers to think of a Twitter campaign as more than just a hashtag. After all, programs built around Twitter can directly connect your brand’s story and voice with your consumers, as well as engage with those outside of your social circle to increase awareness among a new audience.

Social media is here to stay. In particular, brands are thinking about how to maximize their efforts, and on which platforms, to reach the newest and widest audiences. Even if you don’t man social channels for a living, there are reasons to evaluate and assess how you’re communicating on these channels. “For midcareer executives, particularly in the media and related industries, knowing how to use Twitter, update your timeline on Facebook, pin on Pinterest, check in on Foursquare and upload images on Instagram are among the digital skills that some employers expect people to have to land a job or to flourish in a current role,”reported The New York Times early last year.

Anyone can learn how to use the platforms; mastering them, and staying up to date on the latest trends and tendencies, is the difficult part. Some brands have shown expertise on some of the more visual one, and there are lessons to be gleaned from them. But in the ever-evolving world of social media, it’s best to be the first to innovate. If you’re following others, it might be too late.

The concept of “social advertising” on sites like Twitter and Facebook is rapidly taking a back-seat to simple retargeting.

After months of hinting, Twitter today officially announced it will allow marketers to retarget promoted tweets based on first-party cookie and email data they provide. Meanwhile, a growing number of Facebook ad impressions are now being retargeted through its exchange, including ones in its news feed. Concepts like social content distribution and amplification are rapidly being replaced with straight-forward behavioral ads.

“The irony of all this movement by Twitter and Facebook to match ads to emails or regular Web behavior is it shows the weakness of social behavior as an indicator of purchase,” Ben Kunz, vp of strategic planning for Mediassociates told Digiday.

“Chatting about something is nowhere near as powerful as searching for it, or giving a company your email address after you search. Retargeting based on real search intent and not social media frothy Likes or tweets is guaranteed to get a bigger response.”

In the world of standardized banner advertising, the growth of retargeting is unsurprising. For the most part, publishers tip remnant inventory into exchanges and supply-side platforms, and advertisers use behavioral data to extract value from otherwise ineffective media. Retargeting works, and the impressions are cheap, so advertisers keep turning up the dial.

Social media sites had promised something different. They talked about the ability to tap into people’s social graphs to target and tap social influencers. They weren’t selling ads, they were selling opportunities to own content and to earn media.

But that’s changing rapidly. Facebook quicklyrealized that advertisers’ data was far richer than the broad demographic targeting it could offer, and opened up its right-rail ads on an Facebook exchange. A few months later the majority of those ads are now behaviorally retargeted, as well as a growing number of ads in users’ news feeds.

According to recent data from AdRoll, news feed retargeting has a click-through rate 49 times higher than right-rail ads, and 21 times higher than standard web retargeting. Facebook can charge a premium for that level of performance.

Twitter has spotted the retargeting opportunity, too, largely in response to advertiser demand.

“Good for them. We love retargeting. It works for advertisers and it’s a great way to give users more relevant messages,” added Barry Lowenthal, President at The Media Kitchen.

“Twitter retargeting is a wet dream for advertisers. Retargeting is consistently the best performing line on any digital media plan, and marketers are hungry to find new ways to expand the retargeting pool,”  Mediassociates’s Kunz told Digiday.

According to Kunz, the idea of targeting ads on social behavior is a nice one, but when the rubber hits the road social data just isn’t as powerful as users’ browsing histories, and that’s spurring social platforms to jump into the retargeting and ad exchange world with both feet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has praised Twitter for its behavioral advertising opt-out tools. The company said it will honor Do Not Track settings in browser headers for those users that aren’t comfortable with it collecting their behavioral data, and will also provide a setting that allows users to opt out of targeted ads completely.

 Image via Shutterstock