There’s a lot of information a firm can get from trending topics. From the obvious – what is happening right now, to the less obvious – what are people interested in and what drives them. Real-time monitoring of trending topics online is useful in social media and content marketing, and public relations. Social media platforms like Twitter help identify what people around the world or in certain locations are talking about. This may change from day to day or even from hour to hour.
If there is a sudden rise in people searching online for the term “wedding ideas”, it could suggest that there are a lot of people getting married in the next few months. If you’re working in the wedding industry, then this could mean a business opportunity. This might help you to know when you should or should not ramp up your marketing efforts.
On a base level, monitoring trending topics online gives you an overview of relevant topics and trends, and therefore, helping you brainstorm ideas for new marketing content for your brand that is relevant and interesting.
A good PR professional is tech-savvy and interested in topics that journalists are covering. By reading different articles and blog posts, and following journalists on social media, a PR professional will identify the topics of interest for different journalists. Media monitoring is a great way to find journalists in the industry relevant to you, and once you get to know the journalist, you can tailor your content to suit their interest and style.
Tools like content and influencer marketing are usually targeted towards a certain audience. Using trending topics can be beneficial in getting the attention of a wider audience. For example, a blog post or article that relates to a trending topic is likely to get a big traffic boost. Every tweet you send out that includes the hashtag of a trending topic will reach many more people. Targeted marketing is key to getting good conversion rates, but using trending topics can expand your reach to people and potential customers that might not be on your radar.
On the other hand, there might be a topic that you want to highlight or you think needs more exposure, but there’s not much online chatter about it. In this scenario, media intelligence will help you monitor the level of interest over time of the topic so you can create content related to this topic at the right and most fruitful time. You could be in charge of creating a trending topic by creating content based on monitoring the media.
Media monitoring and monitoring trends also serves as a useful tool beyond marketing and PR. For instance, if you need to do research on an industry before launching a product then monitoring the media using keywords that relate to the industry will help in getting a deeper understanding or industry trends and news. It can also help get a better understanding of your competitors in the market.