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» Descriptive real-time insights: Several different tools and social media
platforms in the marketplace can tell you which conversational topics are
trending as the most important. Following these on a regular basis can
help you determine what your consumers are thinking about and what’s
considered topical, of deep interest, or simply hot for them in that given time.
Knowing this information can help you alter your advertising messaging and
how you engage with those consumers on social media platforms, as well as
potentially influence which products you choose to push.
One of the easiest ways to gather these real-time insights is by looking at the
Trends for You topics list on Twitter. This list tells you what topics are being
talked about the most in any given moment by Twitter users. You can then
further narrow down the list to determine the most popular conversation
topics for a particular city or country. Other services built on top of Twitter
help you easily sort through the most popular music, movies, sports events,
and other pop culture activities. Another example is Buzzsumo’s Trending
Now tool (https://app.buzzsumo.com/research/trending).
In a similar fashion, Google Trends helps you draw real-time insights with
similar geographic filters by analyzing the comparative popularity of different
search terms. These tools help you understand what consumers are thinking
and engaging with at any given moment.
» Technologically driven real-time insights: The third way to get to real-time
insights is by using technological tools that analyze conversations on a mass
scale as well as review the popularity of keyword search terms in Google and
Facebook advertising. Based on the cost of those keyword terms, these tools
can tell you what topics matter most to consumers and which are most likely
to elicit a response from them.

Real-time response

The next concept in real-time marketing is real-time response. This is the type of
response that’s typically covered in any social media marketing effort. It’s the
response that you do through the social media channels in as timely and culturally
relevant a fashion as you can. It’s an organic response, through the voice of the
brand, and it’s targeted as much as possible to consumers who care. One point to
note is that although the response is organic, you may want to “boost” the
response with paid media to make sure it gets the attention it deserves. We talk
more about this later in the chapter.

But there is one fundamental difference between real-time response and the more
traditional SMM initiatives that you may undertake. Real-time responses are
organic responses through the lens of real-time marketing insights. So, for
example, if you sold soccer shoes, and you knew that a particular soccer game was

CHAPTER 27 Using Real-Time Marketing 387